Category Archives: Comparative Religions

Contra the Tradition Produced God of Natural Theology

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Natural theology separates God from his Word, and in the Reformed context this separation requires that another mechanism be constructed in order for God to enact relationship with the world; i.e. through the 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑢𝑚 𝑎𝑏𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑚, or through a determining decretal system that inter-links God’s power and being to the rest of the world all along keeping God untouched by the world or the creatures who inhabit it (all in an attempt to sustain the philosophically developed loci known as simplicity, immutability, impassibility, infinity, etc.). The problem, if not recognizable, is that in this ‘classical’ system of theology proper God is taken captive by a set of conditions and categories that have nothing to do with God encountering us in his Word, Jesus Christ. How could it?! If the God produced by natural theology is necessarily uncoupled from his Word for us, the Son, Jesus Christ then how can we ever really say that we have encountered the living God? This is a serious dilemma. Why would I entrust my eternal well-being to a God that history or tradition has produced; wouldn’t this mean that I am really entrusting myself to the producers of the history and the tradition instead?

On the Cosmological Argument and the Universe’s Existence

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Plato

My Philosophy of Religion class at the University of Oxford is now complete. I have just submitted my final essay (1500 words approx.) for the class, which represents the capstone project. I essentially wrote my paper on the cosmological argument for God’s existence. The question I was addressing was “does the universe require an explanation for its existence; and if so, why would it be God?” The following represents my conclusion to said paper.

This essay has considered the following things: 1) That it is reasonable for sentient human beings to reflect on the universe’s existence. It was argued that this is the case because human beings, as finite beings in a finite universe, inherently desire to know their purpose whilst inhabiting the universe; which entails morality. 2) It was further argued that since life in general is finite, and thus contingent, by extrapolation, the universe in general is also a contingent entity that the ‘examined life’ seeks to understand regarding its origination. 3) Engaging with philosopher, T. J. Mawson, based on the “principle of sufficient reason,” as he explained, since the universe is, it requires an explanation. Even so, it was reasoned that ultimately the cosmological argument only has relative value in regard to proving God’s existence.

In conclusion, this essay concludes that the universe does require an explanation for its existence, and that its best explanation is positing something greater than itself as its cause: this “greater than” is classically understood to be God. Even so, it has also become apparent that a simple appeal to something like a cosmological argument does not suffice towards providing human beings with enough knowledge of who or what this God might be regarding the deepest questions of the human heart. So, while an argument from contingency might serve well for pointing out the coherence of a Creator God, it remains unhelpful in presenting someone with a personal God who can make sense of the various moral quandaries human beings are presented with throughout their lifespans. For this, what is required, this essay suggests, is an engagement with revelation claims about God such as is found among the Christians.

The Miracle of the Gospel against Worldviewism

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When we think of ‘worldview’ as an analytic tool, in order to categorize various belief systems worldwide, we often think, as Christians, that we have a spot in that type of indexing. But I am not ultimately a proponent of thinking of the Christian reality in the philosophical terms presupposed for thinking in terms of a worldview. Even so, insofar as this discipline of intellection goes, it can be helpful in at least providing a sense of order in regard to thinking about the various juxtapositions of the various ‘belief systems’ that populate the world, and its peoples. But at the same time, when the Christian gets into the ‘meatier’ things what ought to become evidently clear is that the Christian reality, who is the Christ and the triune God, are incapable of being subject to the sociological strictures used to adjudicate belief systems. The Christian reality gets behind such maneuvers; it is basic to the very fabric of seen and unseen reality; it has no analogues in the created order; it is a miracle of sui generis and novum magnitude.

For the remainder of this article, I want to provide a good word from Karl Barth on the problem that thinking about the Christianity reality, in terms of worldview, presents the Christian with. This type of thinking might contradict dearly held beliefs about the very structure of reality, for some. But I think that what Barth is getting at is, indeed, the most faithful telling the Christian can hear in regard to thinking about both protology and eschatology with reference to their center in Jesus Christ. What will be observed, as I develop this a bit further, is the primordial nature of the Christian reality; such that its reality has no competitors, as if in a dualistic duel.

Robert Dale Dawson writes, with reference to Barth’s theology of the resurrection, and the primal significance and reach such theology has towards Barth’s thinking.

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[1]

Dawson sets us up to read Barth well with reference to the problems that world-view presents its would-be practitioners with. The reader will notice how Dawson’s description of Barth’s thinking of “the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God” dovetails nicely with Barth’s thoughts in general, with regard to thinking the Evangel in the terms that world-view presupposes.

Barth writes at length:

. . . We conclude this introductory consideration with an observation which in the light of this applies to the Christian doctrine of creation as a whole.

Its theme is the work of God which is characterised by the fact that—because the covenant is its basic purpose and meaning and God in Jesus Christ is the Creator—it is divine benefit. The character of its theme, established in this way, is what distinguishes the Christin doctrine of creation from all the so-called world-views which have emerged or may conceivably emerge in the spheres of mythology, philosophy and science. It differs from all these by the fact that it is based on God’s revelation. But this is not merely a formal difference. It is also material. The Christian doctrine of creation does not merely take its rise from another source. It also arises very differently from all such world-views. It not only has a different origin, but has a different object and pursues a different course. The divine activity which is its object can never become the theme of a world-view.

The truth of this assertion is seen at once from the fact that none of the world-views so far known to us has attained to the concept of creation by following to the end the way from noetics to ontology and genesology, but has usually remained stuck either in noetics or at most in ontology. The philosophical equivalent for the theological idea of divine creation would have us to be at least that of a pure and basic becoming underlying and therefore preceding all perception and being. But the world-views normally take their point of departure within the circle of perception and being, subject and object, and are content to describe it according to the relationships determined by a particular view, the variations and differences, progressions and retrogressions, between the individual systems being so great that on the one hand the universe seems to be more like a great thought, and on the other more like a great machine. In some cases the basic problem of becoming, the question of the whence of the universe, whether it be conceived as thought or machine, is not even noticed but naively ignored. In others it is not overlooked but consciously left open, with a resigned or emphatic assertion of its inherent unanswerability. In others again there may be an attempt to answer it, but only in the form of a geneseologically deepened noetics or ontology, so that it is not really answered but only distorted. For the problem of becoming as opposed to that of knowledge or being is a new and independent problem which cannot be answered by any interpretation of knowledge and being and their mutual relationship. It must be viewed independently if it is to escape the suspicion that it has not really been viewed at all.[2]

The reader might better be informed now, at the very least, as to why Barth rejects the discipline and categorization that world-view offers as an analytic tool; at least in regard to thinking the Christian reality. I am, once again (surprise!), in agreement with Barth on this. His rejection of worldview thinking, of course, fits well with his rejection of natural theology; indeed, his rejection of natural theology naturally (pun intended) leads to a rejection of thinking in terms of worldviews.

When it comes to the evangelistic task (gift), personally, I make use of whatever tools seem necessary for that particular engagement. Speaking in terms of worldviews, initially, might be helpful towards grabbing some sort of intellectual footing among the people we are seeking to reach for Christ. But for me, really, the better way is to go the way of Barth; at least when proclaiming the Gospel to people. People (all of us) need to be confronted with the unapologetic and weightiness of the living God; that’s what a genuine presentation of the Gospel does (and comes with). It is the ‘natural man’ who wants to reason their way to whatever they want to reason themselves to. But the Gospel, and its eternal reality, is not natural. The Gospel is supranatural even as it comes veiled in the natural of the human body. It is in this way, on the analogy of the incarnation, that the Gospel (God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; for ‘revelation is reconciliation’) is in the world, but not of it. God is genuinely and fully human in Christ, but human in the sense that He is, in Christ, the archetype, the firstborn of creation, humanity (cf. Col 1.15). He is the One for the many. Even this movement itself, its unilateral ingress, ought to show the seeker the Way, the order of God; indeed, the order of the Gospel itself. The order, as Dawson, with reference to Barth, and Barth himself have shown is of a primordial nature vis-à-vis the creation (and re-creation) of the world. There is no “worldview” that can account for that since the world has no view without first being created and re-created ex nihilo, as it were, in and from the resurrection of God in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Worldviewism can attempt to give account for these heights via propositions and generalizations, but the Gospel itself ultimately resists such attempts; the Gospel represents, to use philosophical jargon: the scandal of particularity. The claim of the Gospel is that there is only One living God, and that He is for us, for the world in Jesus Christ. The claim of the Gospel is that Christ alone is the way, the truth, and the life; that is the primordiality of the whole thing. The Gospel, and all of its implications, is the MIRACLE.

[1] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §42 The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 335-36.

The Hellenic, the Neo-Thomist Origins of Modernity

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When Divine grace is separated from its reality in God, when grace becomes a thing, a substance, a quality infused into the accidents of humanity, it is only one small step removed from being integrated into the essence of what it means to be human. If this step is taken, and it has been in the ‘modern-turn,’ the turn-to-the-subject, the Gifter of grace no longer remains necessary, in a transcendent sense, as grace becomes materialized, immanentized, horizontalized into an ‘immanent frame,’ as Charles Taylor grammarizes. Indeed, Taylor writes with reference to what it means to be human in a frame wherein grace has become the possession, the generative reality of what it means to be a self-determined, self-constructed modern person in the 21st century:

There is another facet of this narrative of secularity which it is worth mentioning here, because of its ubiquity and importance in the “closed” spin on immanence. The story line here is this: once human beings took their norms, their goods, their standards of ultimate value from an authority outside of themselves; from God, or the gods, or the nature of Being or the cosmos. But then they came to see that these higher authorities were their own fictions, and they realized that they had to establish their norms and values for themselves, on their own authority. This is a radicalization of the coming to adulthood story as it figures in the science-driven argument for materialism. It is not just that freed from illusion, humans come to establish true facts about the world. It is also that they come to dictate the ultimate values by which they live.1

Once the secular person came to imagine, through their new ‘social imaginary’ (cf. Taylor) that in fact the classical God was really just a projection of their own imagination, an inner to outer extrapolation of their best selves onto a cipher by which they might live and adjudicate life, they were able to bring diremption for themselves and determine that in fact they were God and thus gods after all. What secularism ultimately brings, this ostensible ‘come of age’ moment, is really just another expression of polytheism, a serpentine belief that humanity itself possesses godness, and thus are the creators of their own reality and existence (in a world where existence and essence have become a singular reality).

As I suggested at the beginning there is a theological origin story behind the secular-turn. Ironically, this turn has a Christian source, albeit as that source has been dressed down by a synthesis of Christian theology with speculative philosophical categories; such categories derived from the classical philosophers like Aristotle et al. The abstraction of grace from the giver or reality of grace, God, takes form most notably in the Catholic theology of Thomas Aquinas. Here we finally get a codification of a burgeoning philosophical frame baptized in the Holy water of the Church. It is the notion of ‘quality’ that takes decisive stage, or in fact ‘substance’ within an Aristotelian frame whereby Divine grace comes to lose its Divine character, at least in the sense that its reality is necessarily grounded in the triune being of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Once this move is made, as I asserted earlier, we are only a few small steps, a few small centuries away from ‘coming of age,’ among other contributing factors during and post-Enlightenment. But I find this abstraction of grace from the Divine life to be an interesting development towards modernity, ironically, even as that is given dye within the early mediaeval and Catholic sitz im leben of Thomas Aquinas (and those who received him, whether Catholic or Protestant Reformational). Helmut Thielicke describes the scenario this way:

We can see clearly at this point that what takes place in man, and not merely what happens to him, has become the object of theological observation. It is again evident, as was clear already with respect to the concept of the imago Dei in man’s original state, that the ontic element in the human ego pushes itself into the foreground. Then the theme of theology is not just the relation between God and man; on the contrary, theology then includes as an independent concern a treatment of “anthropology.” Here is where the fault lies.

The crack, or better, the cracks are themselves produced by the belt of tension which necessarily arises where men attempt to combine ontological and personalistic thinking. The greatest strain and the most evident rupture are undoubtedly to be found at the place where grace ceases to be a divine attribute and becomes an effect distinct from the divine attribute from which it emanates, ie, where grace ceases to be a personal relation to man (the “gracious God”) and becomes something which is ontically infused into man and which is thus present in man, demonstrably present. For it is precisely this distinction between the gracious God and the grace given [gratia data] which is the starting point of the distinctively “Roman” development of the doctrine of grace. To put it epigrammatically and therefore with tongue in cheek, what men want is not primarily God himself, but “divine powers which may become human virtues and qualities” (von Harnack). At this point where grace “visibly” passes into man in accordance with certain well defined practices, eg, sacramental operation, it ceases to be exclusively a subject and becomes a material object, “medicine.” This materialization expresses itself in a variety of ways . . . .2

It would surely be reductionistic to blame Thomas and Aristotle for the modern-turn to the self, and what Taylor identifies as ‘the coming of adulthood story.’ That is not my intention. I am simply noticing a Christian turn made at least within the lifetime of early mediaeval developments, that can plausibly help explain how this ‘enlightened-turn’ finally came to fruition. There are many other contributing ideational and socio-culture pressures that finally brought this turn to consummation, but I think it is notable that we already see these fault lines developing as far back as the Hellenic period of the classical philosophers; and then developed more Christianly with the arrival of Thomas and the Romans.

I am only minimally attempting to illustrate how secular ideas can be traced back to a Christian lineage. Charles Taylor, Michael Gillespie, my personal friend, Derrick Peterson, among others have done further work, more substantially, to demonstrate that my point is not ill founded. Christians have as much to do with the secularity of society as anyone else. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that what it means to be a secular-atheist in the 21st century is really just an expression of a Christian heresy that has attended the Church catholic by way of various expressions; whether those expressions be understood within the Church proper, or in society-at-large as the theater of humanity’s glory, albeit, devoid of the Spirit. Ultimately, when grace is abstracted from God and made a quality capable of being understood purely from the immanent frame of the ‘flatlander,’ it is at this point that Genesis 3 once again receives breath to breathe and make another attempt to elevate itself with zigguartic flare to the ‘high places’ of the living God.

 

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 580 kindle.

2 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 238.

 

 

The Scandal of the Particularlity of Jesus Christ in the World of Pluralism

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I just posted the following to my group blog for a program I am a part of through Princeton Theological Seminary. One of our assignments was to listen to the following podcast by Eboo Patel, and the following is what I wrote in response to what he had to say. Patel is a Muslim, and yet he promotes an inter-faith approach to things. As you will be able to infer from what I wrote in response, I don’t agree with him, even if I think his desires are noble (which I do think they are). Click here to listen to the podcast if you want (it is approx 18 minutes). Here is my response:

ghandiI just finished listening to the assigned podcast for pre-session #4 class work which was a short lecture given by Eboo Patel on interfaith interaction and ecumenical and inclusive engagement between various faith traditions; in particular, for him, between Christians, and his faith tradition, Islam. And yet as I listened to Patel’s very articulate and winsome talk, what stood out to me was that he seemed to be ameliorating the substantial differences and distinctives inherent between Islam, Christianity, and other ‘faith’ traditions. And that he places a higher premium on our shared human and earthly situation, and in the process diminishes the ‘eternal’ realities that give each of our faith traditions there actual distinctiveness; that is, I see Patel diminishing the significance and thus importance of what we think about God. It appears that Patel holds to the an idea that the concept ‘God’ is actually an ‘eternal’ reality, who in the end ends up being the same reality, and thus in the present what is important in the ‘earthly’ experience of ‘God’ is to focus on our shared experiences and various, but shared expressions of ‘faith.’

Interestingly, what Eboo Patel is doing, and the way he is emphasizing a ‘pluralistic’ approach to inter-faith cooperation sounds very similar to the way that theologian John Hick approached his expression and understanding of Christianity through his ‘pluralist universalist’ approach. Christian theologian Christian Kettler describes Hick’s approach (and quotes Hick in the process); notice, as you read this, how well Hick’s approach (as described by Kettler) dovetails with Patel’s approach. I think there is more than coincidence going on between Patel’s informing approach, and how Hick approaches things; here is Kettler on Hick:

Hick responds to this challenge by stressing 1) the structural continuity of religious experience with other spheres of reality, and 2) an openness to experimental confirmation. “Meaning” is the key concept which links religious and mundane experience. “Meaning” for Hick is seen in the difference which a particular conscious act makes for an individual. This, of course, is relative to any particular individual. Verification of this experience is eschatological because of the universal belief in all religions that the universe is in a process leading towards a state of perfection.

The epistemological basis for such an approach is found in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Hick’s soteriology is based on “Kant’s broad theme, recognizing the mind’s own positive contribution to the character of its perceived environment,” which “has been massively confirmed as an empirical thesis by modern work in cognition and social psychology and in the sociology of knowledge.” The Kantian phenomena in this case are the varied experiences of religion. All have their obvious limitations in finite humanity, so none are absolutely true.

In contrast to Kant, however, Hick believes that the “noumenal” world is reached by the “phenomenal” world of religious experience. “The Eternal One” is “the divine noumenon” experienced in many different “phenomena.” So the divine can be experienced, but only under certain limitations faced by the phenomenal world. Many appropriate responses can be made to “the divine noumenon.” But these responses are as many as the different cultures and personalities which represent the world in which we live. Similar to Wittgenstein’s epistemology of “seeing-as,” Hick sees continuity between ordinary experience and religious experience which he calls “experiencing-as”.

The goal of all these religious experiences is the same, Hick contends: “the transformation of human existence from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness.” This transformation cannot be restated to any one tradition.

When I meet a devout Jew, or Muslim, or Sikh, or Hindu, or Buddhist in whom the fruits of openness to the divine Reality are gloriously evident, I cannot realistically regard the Christian experience of the divine as authentic and their non-Christian experiences as inauthentic. [Kettler quoting: Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism, 91.][1]

Even if Patel is not directly drawing from Hick’s pluralism (which I doubt that he is not), it becomes quite apparent how Patel’s ‘earthly’ vis-á-vis ‘eternal’ correlates with Hick’s appropriation of Kant’s ‘noumenal’ (which would be Patel’s ‘eternal’), and ‘phenomenal’ (which would be Patel’s ‘earthly’). What happens is that the actual reality of God is reduced to our shared human experience of what then becomes a kind of ‘mystical’ religious experience of God determined to be what it is by our disparate and various cultural, national, and ‘nurtural’ experiences. In other words, God and the ‘eternal’ becomes a captive of the human experience, and our phenomenal ‘earthly’ experiences becomes the absolutized end for what human flourishing and prosperity (peace) is all about.

Beyond this, Patel, towards the end of his talk uses a concept of ‘love’ that again becomes circumscribed by and abstracted to the ‘earthly’ human experience of that; as if the human experience of love has the capacity to define what love is apart from God’s life. But as Karl Barth has written in this regard:

God is He who in His Son Jesus Christ loves all His children, in His children all men, and in men His whole creation. God’s being is His loving. He is all that He is as the One who loves. All His perfections are the perfections of His love. Since our knowledge of God is grounded in His revelation in Jesus Christ and remains bound up with it, we cannot begin elsewhere—if we are now to consider and state in detail and in order who and what God is—than with the consideration of His love.[2]

In other words, for the Christian, our approach and understanding of ‘love’ cannot be reduced to a shared and pluralistic experience of that in the ‘earthly’ phenomenal realm. Genuine love for the Christian starts in our very conception of God which is not something deduced from our shared universal experience, but is something that is grounded in and given to us in God’s own particular Self-revelation in Jesus Christ.

In conclusion, I would argue that Eboo Patel’s ‘earthly’ pluralist approach is noble, but his approach is flawed because 1) ‘God’ cannot be adumbrated by our human experience (because for the Christian that our understanding of God is revealed from outside of us); and 2) ‘love’ is not simply an human experience that transcends all else, but instead is the fundamental reality of God’s Triune life. If love is the fundamental reality of who the Christian God is, then the object of our ‘faith’ as Christians, by definition, starts in a different place than all other religions and their various conceptions of God. If this is the case, then Christianity offers a particular (not universal) understanding and starting point to knowing God, and thus to understanding how love relates to truth (and vice versa). And yet, Christianity remains the most inclusive ‘religion’ in the world, because God loves all, and died for all of humanity; but this can only be appreciated as we start with the particular reality of God’s life in Jesus Christ.

None of what I just wrote means that we cannot work alongside or with other ‘faith’ traditions; it is just important, I think, to remember that who God is remains very important, and in fact distinguishes us one from the other. And that while we can and should befriend and conversate with other faith traditions, in the midst of this, we should not forget that there still is only one ‘way, truth, and life’ to the Father, and that way comes from God’s life himself, in his dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. If we don’t want to affirm what I just suggested, then what we will be left with is something like Karl Rahner’s ‘anonymous Christians’ with the notion that all ways are ‘valid’ expressions towards the one God ‘out there’ somewhere.

*repost

[1] Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ and the Reality of Salvation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publications, 1991), 65-6.

[2] Barth, CD II/1, 351.

A Response to Miroslav Volf and Larycia Hawkins: Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?

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Miroslav Volf just wrote an article for The Washington Post entitled: Wheaton professor’s suspension is about anti-Muslim bigotry, not theology. It is in response to all of the hub-bub that has been happening in regard to Wheaton College’s tenured political science professor’s Larycia Hawkins decision to donn the traditional head dress for Muslim women, the Hajib, in order to show
muslimwomansolidarity with Muslim’s who are currently experiencing back-lash because of the recent terrorist attacks in North America and elsewhere in the world; she went further though, she claims that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. She said on social media:

“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book,” she posted Dec. 10 on Facebook. “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”[1]

This is where Volf comes immediately into the picture, as he explains in his Washington Post article:

Appealing in part to arguments in my book “Allah: A Christian Response,” Hawkins asserted that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. She did not insist that Christians and Muslims believe the same things about that one God….[2]

Yes, Volf wrote a book entitled Allah: A Christian Response a few years ago; he also gave a presentation at Wheaton College[3] in the past which summarized the main arguments of his book. Hawkins, as Volf notes, was merely taking some of Volf’s thinking and concretely applying it to real life in a context that she thought would make sense. So it makes sense that Volf would come to her defense in the aftermath of what has now unfolded; i.e. the suspension of Dr. Hawkins from her role as professor at Wheaton College (not because of her choice to wear the Hajib, but because of her choice to assert, as Volf does [and he does so with development] that Christians and Muslims worship the same God).

The title of Volf’s article is provocative, but it is inaccurate. It is about theology for Wheaton, as I read them. They believe that Dr. Hawkin’s view about Muslims and Christians worshipping the same God is un-true; and so her suspension comes as a result of this incongruence. But this post of mine isn’t intended to get into whether or not Wheaton’s choice to suspend her was the right one, it is simply, instead going to be a quick response to Volf’s claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God; I will argue that we do not!

Volf writes this in his Post article (at length):

What is theologically wrong with asserting that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, according to Hawkins’s opponents — and mine? 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?[4]

It is these questions (the ones detailed in his last paragraph) that I want to respond to.

Volf argues, in much more depth in his book that the question isn’t or shouldn’t be over referent but over description. In other words, he believes the referent for the Christians and Muslims, in regard to God, is the same; but then he also believes that the way that gets fleshed out is where the distinction comes in (i.e. Trinitarian versus Unitarian etc.). And then as we just saw from the quote he believes that Christians are inconsistent when they tacitly affirm that Jews worship the same God as Christians just based upon a less than full understanding of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob because they reject, of course, Jesus Christ as God’s eternal Son.

I want to contend that Volf is wrong because he frames the scenario in an unsound way. He confuses what the question is: should we be concerned with referent when talking about God, in a first order way, or revelation? My contention is that it is the latter that we should be focusing on; revelation. As I noted on my Facebook wall: The referent is necessarily delimited by the revelational source; there is no generic sense of “God.” This is, as I see it, what’s at stake; i.e. the so called scandal of particularity.

Muslims and Christians are both faith traditions that start and finish with their respective revelational sources. For Muslims this primarily entails the Qur’an and Hadith; for Christians it is Jesus Christ (as God’s Self-interpretion) and Holy Scripture (both Old and New Testaments). The referent that Volf is concerned with is defined by these respective revelations; there is no prior concept of God for these faith traditions before we encounter Him or it within our respective revelational sources. If this is so we cannot conclude as Volf does that Christians and Mulisms have a “sufficiently similar” understanding of God, which for him cashes out in the claim that we worship the same God. Who God is is determined by how God has revealed himself to us; and with that revelation what He says about Himself in both word and deed.

In regard to the Jewish analogy. Volf, as we have seen, argues that Christians who don’t have problems with believing that Christians and Jews worship the same God are being inconsistent if they also want to claim that Muslims are not; since both Jews and Muslims are Unitarian (versus Trinitarian) in their understanding of God. But again, this comes back to an issue of revelational source. The Jewish people, historically, are God’s covenantal people through whom He freely elected to mediate His Son, the Messiah of the world through. Jews and Christians share in their particularity in regard to the God, Yahweh, that they are hearing from; Muslims do not share in that particularity, they have their own defined by the Qur’an and Mohammed himself. Whether or not the Jews, historic or contemporary, want to acknowledge that Jesus is the promised Messiah of the Old Testament is moot in regard to the question of whether or not Christians and Jews worship the same God. As the Apostle Paul noted in regard to the Jews:

14 But their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. 15 Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. 16 But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. [5]

His argument isn’t premised on the idea that they are worshipping a different God outwith the revelational framework that Christians worship through (i.e. the giving of the Old Testament as prefigural revelation of the incarnate God, Jesus Christ), but instead that when they read the Old Testament they do so under a veil that only the Holy Spirit can remove. Muslims don’t enter into their understanding of God from within this revelational framework, as such their ‘referent’ when they think of God is fundamentally distinct from the God that Jews and Christians worship at an ontological, referential level.

Conclusion

I believe that Larycia Hawkins and Miroslav Volf have the right heart; they desire to reach out to Muslims in the name of Christ. I just think that they are doing that based upon the wrong approach. I worked with Muslims in evangelistic and dialogical capacity in the past. The key wasn’t to mitigate the fundamental distinctions between Muslims and Christians, but instead it was to magnify those, in love. Orthodox Muslims would never agree that they worship the same God as Christians (despite what the Pope naively asserted); this for them would be to engage in one of the most heinous sins a Muslim could commit, the sin of Shirk. When the differences are magnified Christ has the opportunity to rise and shine the light on the darkness that Muslims live within; darkness that keeps them in bondage to a revelation provided for by an angel (i.e. Gabriel for Muslims) rather than Godself revealed in Jesus Christ.

I found from my experiences with Muslims that the best approach to reaching out is to establish relationships with them (like with anyone). Be a learner, a student, ask them lots of questions about their faith; most Mulsims will enjoy explaining things to you. But wearing a Hajib and claiming that we worship the same God won’t get you very far with the true blue Muslim; although it might make you feel provocative within your own sub-culture.

 

[1] Chicago Tribune.

[2] Washington Post.

[3] YouTube.

[4] Washington Post.

[5]II Corinthians 3, English Standard Version.