The Same God 3

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.

Some of you may know Miroslav Volf grew up in Croatia/Yugoslavia, so his past is particularly suited to the content of this book.

And there is our question: What are our options about working together with Muslims? How does someone who follows Jesus relate to Muslims? Individually? in the community? as a nation?

I’ve got another kind of question: Why are so many so worked about Rob Bell and are saying nothing about Volf’s contention that the God of Christians and the God of Muslims is the “same”?

Volf examines both with clarity and detail three basic options in the history of the church. He begins with Pope Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolimini; 1406-1454), and we have been to his Renaissance home in Tuscany in Pienza. One of my favorite places in all of Italy.

Pius II’s approach was the Crusades. He saw the threat of the Turks in Constantinople (and saw it fall to them in 1453) to classical learning and to the church and his approach, along with some letter writing, was to mount a crusade. That crusade never occurred, and it was the last attempt at a crusade …

But some today think the way to deal with Islam and the mounting problems of the Muslims is to find a new kind of crusade.

In contrast to Pius II Volf examines Nicholas of Cusa, a brilliant theologian whose solution was a “conference” — what today call dialogue.Volf examines two of Nicholas of Cusa’s writings: On the Harmonious Peace of Religions and A Sifting of the Koran. He pushed for a mutual search for the truth without compromising his own Christian faith; he believed whether people or not know it they are worshiping the same God — the one and only true God; he also believed the problem was error that rests on ignorance not the willful rejection of truth. So that he sees in another’s flawed the faith a distortion of the Christian faith. So Nicholas studied the Koran and sought to explain it as a searching for the truth of what is found in Christ.

Nicholas did not seek for compromise between the faiths, or a watering down of the Christian faith. He preferred charitable interpretations of the other’s faith and he opposed turning Muslims into his enemies. We need to admit that God’s immensity means no one grasps God completely and we don’t need to agree on everything to say we worship the same God. So Volf’s summary.

The third person he examines is Martin Luther. Luther’s approach, no surprise here, was to magnify the difference between Muslims and Christianity by emphasizing the total focus on God’s gracious love for Christians and an ongoing commitment to works and deeds for Muslims (whom he praised in their deeds).

But what surprised me about Luther was the leitmotif of Volf’s concern: Luther believed Muslims believe in and worship the one, true God though they have distorted that God. All religions have some share in the proper knowledge of God. Here’s Volf’s summary of Luther: “Muslims believe in the one true God; they just understand God mistakenly.”

Appealing here to John 4:22, Luther saw the paradigm: they worship what they don’t know; we worship what we do know. But “they” are worshiping the same God.

He chastises Luther for believing in an unconditionally loving God and not showing that to Muslims and how he talked about others — he calls him an equal opportunity name-caller. So Luther used negative stereotypes, refused to assign the positive in the clear overlaps in understanding God, and continued to call Muslims objects of God’s wrath.