Brian LePort has been blogging about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God (on his blog Near Emmaus). I’ve commented on those posts and we’ve had some interesting discussion, and now Brian has offered a complete post dedicated to addressing some of the points I made in comments, and asking a few new questions. I think the key issue for him is when you stop simply saying that two individuals or groups “worship the same God but have differences over some points of doctrine” and it makes more sense to say we/they “worship different gods.”
Let me start by emphasizing that we have a tendency to assume that our worship is “right worship” – and of course one possible meaning of “orthodoxy” is “rightly glorifying God.” Jonah famously defined his identity in terms of worshipping Yahweh, the maker of the sea and dry land. Apparently Jonah’s idea of “worship” involved running in the opposite direction from the one he was told to go. If we think that Christians can be assumed to be worshipping rightly, and that Muslims or any other group can be assumed to be worshipping wrongly, then we may be missing some of the most pointed challenges in the Bible about God preferring outsiders with faith to those in the “community of the elect” but whose attitude is wrong or whose dedication to justice is wanting.
Obviously a key point is how important it may or may not be to God that worshippers think of him (er, them?) as Trinity, for instance. And the impression I get from the Bible (such as Paul’s use of Abraham’s faith as an example of the kind of faith that is pleasing to God) is that God is interested more in attitude than doctrine. After all, which if any of the doctrines that separate Christians and Muslims would Abraham have known about, much less taken sides on?
Brian also makes the mistake of treating the Arabic word Allah as though it is the name of God. And so I’d ask him to stick to either English or Arabic, and use “God” whenever Christians or Muslims use that term (or, if he opts for Arabic, I’d ask that he use Allah as what it is, the word that Arabic speaking Christians and Muslims use for “God”).
As for what God finds acceptable in worshippers, I suspect that what God finds acceptable or unacceptable will often differ from what human beings assume or believe God views in these ways. Humans make conflicting claims about this, and we are prone to project our values onto God. But the impression I get from the Bible as a whole is that attitude and actions seem to matter far more than doctrines to a great many Biblical authors. And if that is the case, then the category of “those acceptable to God” should be expected to cut across religious communities rather than be exactly coterminous with any one of them.
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