Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims Worship the Same God?

Symbols of the three Abrahamic Religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, respectively (link to source).

On December 10, 2015, Larycia Hawkins – a professor of political science at Wheaton College in Illinois – stated that she (as a Christian) intended to wear a hijab during Advent as a gesture of solidarity with Muslims, and quoted Pope Francis in saying that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God” (Gjelten). In response to this statement, Wheaton, an Evangelical Christian school, put Hawkins on administrative leave, claiming that they needed “time to review whether her statement puts her at odds with the faith perspective required of those who work there” (Gjelten). Hawkins eventually agreed to step down from her position at the school, where she had previously become the first black female professor to receive tenure (Graham).

Both Hawkins’ actions and her dismissal from the school sparked renewed interest in the longstanding theological debate about whether the God worshiped by Christians, Muslims, and Jews is in fact the same deity. This debate is one that dates back to the origins of the three religions, and which is exemplified by the beginnings of Islam, as described in Karen Armstrong’s book Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Here, Armstrong states that Allah, the high God of the Arabian pantheon (whose name simply means “God”), was commonly believed to be the same deity “worshiped by the Jews and the Christians” (Armstrong 217). Thus, when Muhammad received revelations from Allah during the month of Ramadan in 610 CE, he saw these revelations as nothing new, but rather believed that “what was revealed through him was simply the old religion of the one God” (Armstrong 217-218). Islam, therefore, was not something alien, but rather the next iteration in a series of prophets and messengers that God had sent to “all the people on the face of the earth” (Armstrong 218). It did not cancel out the teachings of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Job, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus, but acted as a reminder and restatement of the message that God had sent to humanity.

Unfortunately, the same opinion was not held by all of the Jews and Christians at this time – as seen when the Jews of Yathrib refused to accept Muhammad as a prophet – and so the Qur’an instructed Muslims to return to the “original, pure religion of Abraham,” who had lived before the Torah and gospel and was therefore neither Jewish nor Christian, but rather a Muslim – “one who had made the total surrender of his life to God” (Armstrong 220). Muhammad also stated that it was only by returning to the original religion of Abraham that one might “make God, and not a religious establishment,” the object of one’s worship, though he said that Muslims must also respect those who believed in an earlier revelation (Armstrong 220-221).

More recently, in response to Hawkins dismissal from Wheaton College, Zeki Saritoprak – a professor of Islamic studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland – quoted a story in the Qur’an in which Jacob’s sons said to him that after he died they would “worship the God of [his] fathers' – of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac” (Gjelten). Saritoprak states that according to this definition, the God that Muslims worship today is the same as that of Christians and Jews. Yet belief in a triune God has also lead some Christians to assert that their God is different from the deity of the other Abrahamic faiths. According to Vincent Cornell, Emory University’s scholar of Islam and co-author of the book Do Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God?, if this belief in Jesus as an incarnation of God is the definition of the Christian deity (as many Evangelicals believe), “then one could make the argument… that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God” (Emory News Center Editors). But Cornell also states that if one is talking about a truly Trinitarian theology in which there is “a conceptual separation between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (a view taken by many Anglicans and Methodists), then “one could make the argument that the Father is analogous to Allah” (Emory News Center Editors). In fact, in 1964, the Second Vatican Council affirmed that Muslims “together with us adore the one, merciful God,” revealing that some Christians do in fact believe in a single, shared deity (Gjelten). In short, the question of whether the Abrahamic deities are the same depends upon one’s definition of God, and this definition can differ between the many groups that exist within a single religion.

Amy Plantinga Pauw, a professor of Christian theology at Louisville Seminary, states that “To say that we worship the same God is not the same as insisting that we have an agreed and shared understanding of God” (Gjelten). Thus, just as differences in theology exist between members of the same religious group (as Cornell also asserts that differences exist within Judaism and Islam), so too are there differences between the three Abrahamic religions. These differences do not necessarily define the deity of the three religions as being separate or the same, just as the differences that exist within the same religion are not indicative of a fundamental difference at the root of understanding, or of a difference in deity. As Cornell states, “you can’t bridge the differences between religions if you don’t know the differences that exist within your own religion” (Emory News Center Editors). The differences in theology that exist within each religion are just as determinative of whether one views the deities of the three Abrahamic religions as the same God as are the differences between the religions themselves, and the answer to this question of a single, shared God varies from person to person, depending on their own internal truth.

 

Citations

Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Alfred A Knopf, 1996.

Emory News Center Editors. “Do Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God?” Emory University, 27 Nov. 2012, https://news.emory.edu/stories/2012/11/spirited_cornell_all_worship_ same_god/index.html.

Gjelten, Tom. “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?” NPR, 20 Dec. 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/12/20/460480698/do-christians-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god.

Graham, Ruth. “The Professor Wore a Hijab in Solidarity – Then Lost Her Job.” The New York Times Magazine, 13 Oct. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/the-professor-wore-a-hijab-in-solidarity-then-lost-her-job.html.

https://www.christianity.com/wiki/cults-and-other-religions/what-are-the-abrahamic-religions.html.