I completely agree with beaglelady that we should acknowledge that Christians have more than one “God[s] of Abraham.”: their own (those who are fundamentalist), their take on the Jews’ God of Abraham since Christ, and their take on the Muslims’ God of Abraham. This Christian doesn’t have a God of Abraham, but sees that billions do. Billions of Gods of Abraham.
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Muslim treatment of women often leads much to be desired. Oh wait…
Well and good for you. But in that case, your position would seem to be radically opposed to beaglelady’s first position: i.e. “Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship the God of Abraham”. She’d have expressed herself closer to your thinking on the matter if she had said, “Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship a God of Abraham.”
So, how many Gods do you think Abraham thought were appearing to him in Genesis 17:1?
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Och man he was a strict monolatry henotheist at least. I’ve known Orthodox (hey @NickolaosPappas?) assume the Trinity under the Terebinth Trees of Mamre, on the way to nuking the Cities of the Plain, as reflected in the Rublev ikon we have over the fireplace, but they were crew angels, the Thomas Ferebee and William Sterling Parsons of the mission. YHWH was the Paul Tibbetts.
No no no.Jews and Muslims dont accept Jesus.We accept YWHW and Christ (The Father and The Son.Muslims actually call the bible corrupt.I think theres one way to God .So no its not the same
Also we do forget that Mohammad the Prophet massacred an entire city on his way to qonquest.As someone said Mohammud was somewhat a warlord
Our theological differences are huge though.I think we all agree on this
Exodus 3:13-15 (NIV2011)
13 Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ”
15 God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’ “This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation.
YHWH told Moses at the burning bush that His sacred personal Name is YHWH. In the Hebrew Bible God’s Name is used, but the Jews do not speak it because they say it is sacred. Instead they use the title ADONAI, which translated LORD. The Greek translation of the OT, which was made by Jews the keeps convention, as do ither languages.
Assuming that God, YHWH, said these words, “This is my Name (YHWH) forever…”
why did not God reveal YHWH as His Name to the Muslims.
For the record: The name Jesus is the Greek form of the Jewish name that means “YHWH saves.”
YHWH is Christ. What about Sophia the Holy Ghost?
There was a huge debacle at my alma mater over this question, “Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?” It is a more nuanced question than you all are making it out to be.
I think Miroslav Volf points out something salient here:
Muslims deny the Trinity and incarnation, and, therefore, the Christian God and Muslim God cannot be the same. But the conclusion doesn’t square. And Christians, though historically not friendly to either Judaism or the Jews, have rightly resisted that line of thinking when it comes to the God of Israel.
For centuries, a great many Orthodox Jews have strenuously objected to those same Christian convictions: Christians are idolaters because they worship a human being, Jesus Christ, and Christians are polytheists because they worship “Father, Son and the Spirit” rather than the one true God of Israel. What was the Christian response?
Christian theologians neither insisted that they worship a different God than Jews nor did they accuse Jews of idolatry. That’s a step that would have been easy to make, for if Jews don’t worship the same God as the Christians, then they worship the false God and, therefore, are idolaters. Instead of rejecting the God of the Jews, Christians affirmed that they worship the same God as the Jews, but noted that the two religious groups understand God in in partly different ways.
Why is the Christian response to Muslim denial of the Trinity and the incarnation not the same as the response to similar Jewish denial? Why are many Christians today unable to say that Christians and Muslims worship the same God but understand God in partly different ways?
I note your contribution.
That was one of my principal reasons for rejecting Islam and affirming, in the original “What do you think about Islam?” thread, that:
- In Islam, Allah means “God”. That’s His name. Islam uses many other words to describe or refer to Him, but Allah’s name is “God” and that’s what He is.
So what, you ask?
Well, apparently, Allah forgot that He once had a name: Yahweh. “Yahweh” is a name, and it doesn’t mean “God”. So, Islam tells me that sometime between the mid-1st century and 700+/- A.D… God stopped using his name and decided to make things easier for non-Jews to call on him."
Oddly enough, there are some folks who say that “Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship the God of Abraham. When I reject that claim, I’m told that "[then] we should acknowledge that Christians have more than one “Gods of Abraham”.
Does it make sense to you that there are only two possibilities: i.e. Either Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship “the God of Abraham”, or we should acknowledge that Christians have more than one “Gods of Abraham”? That doesn’t make sense to me, regardless who states the two alternatives.
One and only one YHWH appeared to Abraham (Genesis 17:1) and entered into a covenant with Abraham. And, IMO, the differences between YHWH and Allah outnumber and outweigh the similarities between them to all but the naive and uninformed. The fact, if it is a fact, that you and I do not define or describe or worship precisely the same YHWH is an entirely different matter And I hold firmly that Muslims do not worship YHWH, regardless how many Muslims, Christians, or Jews tell you that YHWH and Allah are the same.
Debacle? I don’t doubt that.
It’s the best word for it. The whole situation got national attention and resulted in a documentary.
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Not that the following will make a difference, but it certainly summarizes and expresses my thoughts on the subject. Is Allah of Islam the same as Yahweh of Christianity?
- For most Muslims, Allah is the only God and therefore must be the same God as the one that the Jews and Christians worship. Similarly, for some Christians, Allah is just another name for the one God of the universe. For others, however, the Muslim Allah and the biblical Yahweh are contradictory and cannot refer to the same being, for, they say, “how can the God of Muhammad be the Father of Jesus Christ?” The question before us, then, is whether the terms “Allah” and “Yahweh” are just two names for the same God, or are they referring to different Gods? (And since there can only be one true God, the ultimate question is, “if they are different, which one is the true God?”)
See this CT article for a range of responses:
Here is the full report from missiologists published by EMS:
From the last link, OB_Fall_2016.pdf:
- While evangelical Christians do not accept that the Qu’ran is revealed by God, bridge-builders nonetheless may seek to avail themselves of the common ground afforded them by the Muslim explict affirmation that the Bible is from God
Clever little buggers, eh?
Sez you. What if “Before Abraham was, I am” were Yahweh’s words, spoken with Jesus’ voice?
Bridge-building is not a dishonorable position to be in and is a key component of Evangelical missions. (It’s almost like your default dismissiveness might affect your ability to engage in productive dialogue.)
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Claiming that Muslims understand God differently its still the same thing.We think our understanding is right and theirs wrong.They think the opposite.Theres one truth.Both ways of understanding God cannot be true
I agree. I can have an idea of who Hillary Clinton is and what she is like and another person can have a wildly different idea of who Hillary Clinton is and what she is like, and one or both of us might have views that are not shaped by actually knowing Hillary Clinton, and one or both of us may have understandings that aren’t true. But we can still have the same referent, the real Hillary Clinton, in mind. That is the crux of the issue here, I think. To some extent Muslims, Jews, and Christians have the same referent in mind - the one God who revealed himself to Abraham. To the extent that they have wildly different conceptions of who that referent is and what he is like, they can be described as holding different ideas of God. Do people worship their idea of God, or the referent himself, regardless of how wrong their conception is? I think you can make valid arguments in both directions, similar to the idea that some people follow “a Jesus” of their own creation, even though there is only one referent in history and in reality.
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