On December 15, 2015, Wheaton College, a prestigious Evangelical institution near Chicago, put a tenured faculty member on administrative a leave pending an investigation on alleged heresy charges. Larycia Hawkins, a political scientist, had put on a hijab (the Muslim kerchief that covers the hair but not the face) for the duration of Advent, as a sign of solidarity with Muslims feeling threatened by Islamophobia. In explaining her action, Hawkins said that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. (Oddly, for one who defined herself as an “orthodox Protestant”, Hawkins cited Pope Francis who had said the same.) I don’t think that the administration was greatly troubled by the kerchief (Wheaton, founded in 1860 by abolitionists, has a record of combining conservative theology with progressive causes); it was the statement about common worship that led to the charge that Hawkins had violated the declaration of faith that she had signed as a member of the faculty (a common practice at Evangelical colleges). That faith has a Biblical foundation in the speech made by the Apostle Peter before the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem (Acts 4:12). With reference to Jesus, Peter said: “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
There have been protests from some faculty and students. I don’t know what pressures came from the outside. (Wheaton has had some influential alumni, including Billy Graham.) In any case, on February 8, 2016, in a joint statement Hawkins and Wheaton’s President Philip Ryken said that they had reached a confidential agreement that Hawkins would voluntarily resign from her position. At least for the moment this is the end of the story. But, curiously, a panel of Muslim judges in southeast Asia recently agreed with some Evangelicals in Illinois that Muslims and Christians don’t worship the same God. On June 23, 2014 the highest court of Malaysia upheld a ban that a Catholic publication may not use the name “Allah” when applying it to the Christian God. The reasoning behind the ruling was that this usage would confuse innocent Muslims and make them vulnerable to “proselytism” (which is illegal). The ruling allowed the naming of “Allah” in worship or other intra-Christian settings, with no confused Muslims being dragged into baptism. But lower-level authorities have nevertheless used the ruling to confiscate Bibles and other Christian publications: Thus, broadly speaking, only Muslims are to be allowed to pray to “Allah” by that name. Already in the Quran a major offence is shirk, idolatry or polytheism—a concept coined specifically to reject Christianity, which denies the central Quranic affirmation that God has neither offspring nor associates.
It is instructive to know that this rejection of Christianity has a Jewish antecedent. When the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem first turned against the followers of Jesus, this was probably because of the claim that he was/is the Messiah. But as his followers developed the full-blown Christology of the doctrine of the Trinity, it was this that led to the rejection of Christianity by rabbinical Judaism. The Hebrew synonym for shirk is shituf, precisely the idea that God has “associates”. The term is first used in the Babylonian Talmud, which was compiled over the first few centuries of the common era (by about 500 CE—over a century before Muhammad). One must observe that the Christian Church had quite some difficulties reconciling its claim that Jesus and/or the risen Christ had both a human and a divine nature. For the Christian idea of redemption to be plausible—God in Jesus taking upon himself all the sin and suffering of creation—just the right balance between the two natures had to be found: Too much divine, and Christ would be a god coming to earth like a Greek or Hindu avatar; too much human, and Jesus would just be a great teacher, like Socrates or Confucius. The historian Philip Jenkins (Baylor University) recently published a very useful summary of this struggle, from council to council, in his book Jesus Wars (2010).
Thus Judaism resembles Islam in many ways, but especially in the absoluteness of its monotheism. The Shema, the basic Jewish confession of faith, proclaims “Hear, o Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” “The Lord” is the Hebrew Adonai, the substitute (along with Hashem, “the Name”) for the four-letter secret name of God, never to be said aloud except once a year by the High Priest in the holiest place of the Temple. The Shehada, the basic Muslim confession of faith, is equally stark in its monotheism: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” (Be careful: Just saying it once before witnesses makes you a Muslim, making you guilty of apostasy if you in any way recant your submission.) The Nicene Creed (still recited repeatedly in churches at the celebration of communion) also declares that “We believe in one God”, but then qualifies this in a way that to Jewish or Muslim ears must sound like an exact definition of shituf or shirk—“Jesus Christ… the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.”
If one steps back from the important theological differences between these three west Asian religions, one may look at them from the perspectives of south and east Asia, especially those of Hinduism and Buddhism. The similarities between the three “Abrahamic” religions stick out more visibly than the differences. To be sure, the religions that emerged from the Indian subcontinent, especially in their most sophisticated versions, also point to an underlying unity beyond the many gods or boddhisatvas—the ultimate unity of the Brahman or the divine cosmos and the deepest reality of the self or Atman, as taught by the Hindu Upanishads—and the blazing reality revealed upon the attainment of Enlightenment or Buddhahood. This unity transcends the many gods of Hinduism (sometimes given as 33 in number, sometimes as 300,000 or even 330 million), or the assembly of many thousands of boddhisatvas, each in charge of a vast world or Buddha-field. But this unity, disguised by the illusions endemic to the endless wheel of reincarnations, rebirths and re-deaths, is far removed from the view of all reality as created by the one God whose promise is eternal glory.
Do Christians and Muslims worship he same God? The present interfaith etiquette answers yes. This is certainly useful politically in the confrontation with radical Islamism, and I would not deplore this use against a dangerous and utterly evil movement. But one can also answer the question with a yes for analytic rather than political reasons. Muslim tradition (hadith) has maintained that the Quran reveals 99 names of God. Perhaps this was in the mind of Al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE), the great thinker who sought to integrate the insights of mainstream Islamic thought with the insights of Sufi mysticism, when he wrote: “Deliver me, o Allah, from the sea of names!” But the 99 names of God, do not belong to 99 gods. All of them refer to the one God, whom Muslims, Jews, and Christians worship (even when they don’t like the idea).
