The Same God 2

Miroslav Volf, Professor at Yale, on the dedication page of his new book — Allah: A Christian Response, says this:

To my father, a Pentecostal minister who admired Muslims, and taught me as a boy that they worship the same God as we do.

Volf’s opening to the book is the famous Regensburg University speech of Pope Benedict XVI in which he set the Christian God over against the Muslim God, the former the God of Reason and the latter the God of Will. The speech caused an uproar.

Before we go further I want to quote Volf’s major claim: “Commitment to the properly understood love of God and neighbors makes deeply religious persons, because they are deeply religious, into dedicated social pluralists” [he means everyone becomes neighbors](32).

Do you agree? Does our commitment to love God and neighbor make us even more committed to the neighbor who is unlike us?

This was followed by three responses, two from Muslims and one from a conglomerate of Christians and Muslims. The first response by Muslims was called The Open Letter (focusing on the non-coercion in religion according to the Qu’ran, and that Allah is not capricious, and love of God/neighbor was central to this), and this was followed by The Common Between Us and You — both directed at the Pope — and then Volf was part of a group that drafted the Yale Response. [In my edition of Volf’s book these documents are unfortunately not published.]

The issues that arose can be reduced to some simple ideas:

1. These folks believe Christians and Muslims believe in the same God but understand that God differently. No one disputes the profound differences between Christian Trinitarian beliefs and the Allah of Islam.

2. These folks believe the center of the Muslim and Christian faiths are love of God and love of neighbor. We can quibble — and I certainly would — over “center” here and I can’t speak whether or not love of God and love of others is fundamental to Islam. But the point, so it seems to me, remains profoundly valuable: Muslims and Christians can work for peaceful coexistence by learning to love one another. Volf believes this would be ramped up in degree if it is true — which he believes is true — that the two actually do believe in the same God.

3. The principal actors here are Pope Benedict and Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal. Eventually they came to resolution between themselves over the Pope’s earlier statements.

He wants to know if the “object” is the same: Do Christians and Muslims actually believe in and love the same God?

He believes too that if the two are not worshiping the same God the whole “Common Word” project crumbles to the ground. Maybe so, but I suspect there are other ways to work together for peace.

I’d like to register here some of my thoughts:

1. I’m not yet convinced of the Same God theory, but I am convinced that the follower of Jesus, the Christian, is to love God and to love the neighbor as himself. We are both monotheistic religions but that’s not enough for me… but this topic will become more focused as this book develops and we’ll discuss it later.

2. This means whether Muslims agree or not, and I’m encouraged by those who have participated in these concerns, I am called to love Muslims as my neighbor.

3. But I want to press followers of Jesus to see this in a bigger idea: we are called to love our enemy. This is found in Matthew 5:43-48. The “enemy” there was not necessarily a person’s personal enemy, but probably Rome and its representatives in the Land. Jesus told his followers to love them because God, too, showered his love on them as evidenced in natural blessings.

4. Matthew 13 has a parable called the Parable of the Wheat and Weeds, and the best reading of this parable is about peaceful coexistence (not of a mixture of saints and sinners in the Church). Jesus urges his followers not to seek to rip up weeds now but to wait for God’s judgment — but to live peacefully with weeds in the here and now.

Hence, Volf’s overall theory is what I think Jesus calls us to do: we are called to love Muslims and to work together for peace, and we do this best by loving our enemies as our neighbors. All become neighbors in the vision of Jesus.