God in Bethlehem, God in Mecca?

Last updated on: January 14, 2016 at 1:41 pm by Robert Hunt

God in Bethlehem, God in Mecca? 2016-01-14T13:41:41-07:00 Robert Hunt

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The question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God is for all practical purposes purely theoretical. Whether or not we worship the same God we do not worship together. Muslims may visit, but usually do not join in Christian worship because Christians worship Christ, which Muslims believe is a violation of God’s Oneness. And Christians may visit, but cannot join Muslim prayers because Muslims assert that Muhammad is God’s prophet, which Christians cannot easily accept if they take seriously what Muslims mean by this statement.

Yet although we do not worship God together, Christians and Muslims do ponder the same theological problem: What are the conditions under which a transcendent and utterly other God can be known by finite creatures at all? To merely assert that there is revelation is naive. For all revelation takes a human, and thus finite and unstable form as soon as it is received and transmitted by finite human persons. And this is true whether you locate the revelation in a text or a person or a voice coming down from heaven or a prophet journeying up to heaven. You can disagree about whether Jesus, or the Qur’an, or the Torah is one true revelation of God’s nature and will (or a revelation at all). But you can’t escape the paradox of infinite God in a finite form. Just asserting your particular dogma isn’t a credible answer to a real question.

It is in answering this question that Christians, Muslims, and Jews found their theologies were weaving in and out of each others paths of reasoning for more than a thousand years. Arab philosophers got Latin names, and Christian theologians learned Arabic in order to gain access to Greek texts available only in translation. Yes, they fought intellectual duels in defense of their exclusive truth claims. They also reasoned together on the relation of natural and special revelation, how it could be that God was revealed as one who loved the world, and what it meant to speak of both justice and mercy from the same holy source.

This long theological conversation ended in part because during the colonial era Christian hubris, bolstered by military power, marginalized both Muslim and Jewish theological discourse. But the more important reason was the rise of the Enlightenment and its mutant offspring Fundamentalism. Enlightened Europeans no longer believed they had anything to learn from ancient theological debates. For many Christians those debates were becoming a cultural curiosity, a civilizational touchstone rather than a source of knowledge.

In this cultural milieu fundamentalists and their more moderate offspring the evangelicals sought to defend divine revelation against the assaults of a liberalism that located the knowledge of God in human affect. But their strategy was to locate all truth about God in a single revealed source, the Christian scripture. And the words of scripture had to be accepted by faith both because their source was Jesus Christ, the Word of God, and because sin had so marred human reason as to make it worthless for theological reflection apart from revelation.

So whatever could be learned about either God or even revelation itself could be learned only from within God’s Word concretely available in the Bible – which was self-certifying as to its truth and sufficiency. For fundamentalists and many evangelicals the possibility of revelation isn’t a question to be explored, it is a dogma to be asserted and argued. And following, all other revelation is excluded if it in any way contradicts the accepted normative revelation of God’s truth. The great questions of the ancient Jewish, Christian, Muslim dialogue are waved away with indisputable dogmatic claims supposedly taken straight from the Bible.

(As an aside, this position in relation to scripture is taken by a major school of Islamic theology and by some Orthodox Jews as well. This only shows that it is a theological option that exists apart from any particular revelation, showing again the impossibility of an enclosed and self-sufficient revealed system of theological reflection.)

In such a situation, and as I mentioned it exists in Islam and Judaism as well, theological dialogue comes to a standstill. Of course there are many things to discuss and clarify with people of other religions or Christian viewpoints when it comes to seeing one anothers differences. And this is particularly so in a hopefully civil and democratic society. Christians can pursue science and sociology and all sorts of other matters of secondary importance in a multi-faith context.

Yet there remains an odd paradox. Evangelicals agree that they do not know everything about the finite immanent world, and thus can learn from non-Christians (unless such knowledge contradicts their interpretation of scripture.) Yet they frequently assert that they do know everything it is possible to know about the infinite and transcendent God, and thus have nothing to learn from non-Christians.

I would like to suggest that inter-religious dialogue would be enriched if the participants were to assume that all peoples have, in their long journey in the presence of their creator, learned some things that we Christians never knew, or perhaps have forgotten. Put in Christian terms, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.”

True, Paul believes that humans have learned to ignore and misunderstand God’s self-revelation preceding Jesus Christ. And thus they cannot count on being saved from God’s righteous judgment. But it is equally true, as Paul well knew, that not all have refused to acknowledge God entirely, or respond (however naively) to God’s goodness. They build altars to the One they do not know. Their hearts are filled with joy as God keeps God’s first promises to humankind. The beginning of an evangelistic conversation is not, for Paul, what Christians know that nobody else knows. It is the shared knowledge and longing of creatures for their creator.

Do non-Christians worship the same God as Christians? The truth is that we rarely know the longing and intention of their hearts. Simply based on the words they utter, Muslims at prayer are not thinking about the divinity of Christ. They are absorbed in placing themselves completely at the service of their Creator. The same might well be said of Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus. And one hopes the same is true of Christians of all stripes and doctrines.

Perhaps a humble agnosticism is in order. Since the human heart is something we cannot see perhaps it is best to leave the question of who others worship to the One who alone will decide to accept their praise.

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