That sounds like Lewis’ “Footnote to All Prayers” (one of my favourites):
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.
I’m not sure why this is upsetting to you. I didn’t see T trying to claim to be in your tribe and you certainly don’t seem interested in his. He’s just offering up some reasonable observations - that we can be wrong about things even while we are thinking of the same subject. There is such a thing as being wrong about somebody; you do know that right? And it doesn’t necessarily mean that the person you’re attempting to describe must be an entirely different person than your conversation partner has in mind. If I think Lincoln was a hero for what he did as president and another person thinks him a villain, we’re probably still thinking of the same person - even while we get stuff wrong about him. I’m not sure why you find that such a challenge.
Oh, yes! Thanks for that - And I’m not sure I had even read that poem, but probably had read something about it. So thanks for sharing the source itself!
Levinson made a great point about how Abraham is viewed: on the basis of Genesis, Abraham stumbles morally repeatedly, yet the Quran presents him as a paragon of virtue.
The major differences between Judaism and Christianity came in the second and third centuries when Jewish rabbis started rejecting things Jews had believed, doing so because Christians believed those or something similar, and started changing the interpretation of a number of texts so they couldn’t be used to point to Jesus. Of course there was a Christian backlash.
I know I said I would not comment further, but I want to correct myself, so…
… yesterday the fact that the Marcionite church rejected the Hebrew Bible came to my mind. Their Bible only contained an edited version of the Gospel of Luke and Paul’s letters. For example, they deleted the references to Abraham in Galatians. So here we have a Christian group that did not view Abraham as their forefather.
My point is still that I think we can use the term “Abrahamic religions”. But that is also influenced by my background as a teacher. I need to keep things simple for my students. So IMO there is nothing wrong with telling them that the two largest religions in this country see Abraham as their common forefather, as do the Jews. And that that is the reason why these three religions are often called the Abrahamic religions. That’s just the definition in Dutch dictionaries.
I do that with everything. For example, I speak about the Roman empire. Although actually from Octavian on the governmental structure is called the Principate and from Diocletian on the Dominate.
This has been thought-provoking discussion, thanks
I started with thinking that there is only one Creator, only one Most High God. From this viewpoint, everyone who tells about the one and only God must be referring to Him, even if the description about this God would be mostly wrong. We should separate the true God from the teachings that may draw a very distorted picture of Him. Accept that there is only one true God but reject false teachings about this one true God.
After reading all comments, I started to think whether ‘God’ or ‘Creator’ is a concept or a role, rather than a person. There is a throne for ‘God’ or ‘Creator’ but people may try to put different ‘persons’ on that throne. From this viewpoint, one description of God (JHWH) may be very different from another description of a ‘person’ that is claimed to be ‘God’. This viewpoint supports the idea that JHWH in the Bible is not the ‘Allah’ in the Quran, even if both are told to be the only God and Creator.
Anyway, I support the viewpoint that we rather try to find common contact points than barriers. The reason for this is that we should spread the good news about the true God. If there are just hostility, demonization, building of complete barriers that separate ‘us’ from ‘them’, how would one of ‘them’ listen to us, or see the witness of our life (I hope we are truly living as disciples of Jesus)?
Finding and seeing common contact points is not giving up the truth. You can be friendly and loving towards people of different religions without giving up the crucial teachings of Jesus. The better you understand why you believe what you believe, the more open you can be towards those who think in a different way - if you stand on a rock, they cannot take the rock away.
Edit:
My comment was sent as a reply for Mervin but the latter part of my comment is mainly for others, including me
Do the authors of the Tanakh not count? What of the gospel writers, or the author(s) of the Pauline epistles? What of the Great Commission that is given to all Christians?
Those aren’t personalities. Those are descriptions of what people think God did. Some may be wrong.
I don’t think Jews ever believed in the Trinity, did they? That seemed to grow out of explaining Jesus’ divinity, something that isn’t part of Judaism.
Do you think Jews and Christians believe in the same God?
But Jews and Christians agree about God’s character – Islam’s Allah is worse than the bad caricature of God in the Old Testament.
A difference in character is a vast difference.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
They find that because they want to. An honest reading of the Old Testament cannot support that – they, like some Jews of old, ignore the prophets, who describe God as loving, merciful, patient, etc.
Not really – none of the rabbis I knew agreed that Islam’s Allah is the same entity as Yahweh, and not many Christians I’ve known would either.
Lewis – I mentioned that in a post some time back.
JHWH, God, and Allah are the same God, seen in different ways. Christians see him as triune, which Jews and Muslims reject. A key reason for the rise of Islam was that the Arabian desert tribes at the time couldn’t understand the concept of the Trinity (which is difficult anyway!) and mistakenly thought Christians worshipped 3 gods. Islam is militantly monotheistic.
I would completely agree that Islam is by far the most divergent of the three.
I do understand the sentiment, and there is good reasoning behind it. What stands out to me is if it is valid for one religion to tell another religion what God they actually believe in.
Just to be clear, I openly admit that I am being more argumentative than I probably should be. There are times that certain topics set off the “Yeah, but . . .” neurons in my head, and this happens to be one of them.
With all due respect to the scholars the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament. As just one example how does one explain Ephesians 1: 4-10. Salvation was planned before creation and it happened. That is why we joyfully celebrate Ressurrection Sunday.
Interesting, Alan…from what I have read, there could be a muddling of some of that. The idea of a “complex” deity–eventually called the Trinity – began in the century or so before the time of Jesus. It grew out of readings of Daniel, plus an intertestamental book or two. So it existed within the religious practices of Israel at that time. And there was an expectation in that era that one day a Jewish Man would come, and He would be both God and Messiah…After followers of Jesus began using the concept they named “the Trinity”, this gave others “pause” – as we might say, and they re-tooled some of their thoughts. But it is a complex subject (God is three-in-One? ) and certainly fuel for two or more thousand years worth of debates and (in our time) books and YouTube videos. Islam rose (centuries later) when someone decided he wanted a revelation and a religion for his own ethnic group. His accounts of being in a cave and having a supernatural being grab at him and attempt to choke him and dictate words to him so that he (Mohammed) ran out of the cave in a panic— are pretty unsettling. And he (Mohammed) evidently was also influenced by some of the Christian controversies over the nature-of-God as it existed at that time. Modern assertions that Moses predicted the coming of Mohammed seem out-of-kilter for biblical thinking. But still, the assertion is made in an effort to connect one of these religions with the other two.
And I was glad to see that video!! That is, the one that started off this discussion…
