Is Allah the same God?

Larycia Hawkins at Wheaton
from her Facebook page

You may have heard of the controversy at Wheaton College over the professor who donned a hijab (head covering) in solidarity with peaceful Muslims who are currently an object of hatred.

Christianity Today's article
Miroslav Volf in the Washington Post
Roger Olson on his blog

1. Wheaton's response was mature and measured. They found no fault in her wearing the scarf to express Christ's command to love both our friends and enemies. Implicitly, I do not believe they found fault in her implicit point that carpet bombing the Middle East, relishing the thought of shooting Muslims, or some attitudes toward Muslim refugees entering the United States were not particularly good representations of Christian values.

Here's Wheaton's statement: "The College has no stated position on the wearing of headscarves as a gesture of care and concern for those in Muslim or other religious communities that may face discrimination or persecution. We support the protection of all Americans including the right to the free exercise of religion, as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States" (Philip Ryken, President of Wheaton).

The college also stated, "Faculty and student expressions of concern about the treatment of Muslims have been grounded in a desire to live peaceably and respectfully with all people, including our neighbors of Islamic and other religious faith traditions. While these commitments are consistent with our Statement of Faith and Community Covenant, overtures of Christian friendship must be enacted with theological clarity as well as compassion."

2. What got Dr. Hawkins on suspension, pending review, is her comment that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. I've always found this statement ambiguous. It seems that it does not really say what it is trying to say. After all, there is only one true God out there.

Can we express the options in clearer, less ambiguous forms?

• Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have hold of different parts of the same elephant? In this case, they would all be right on some aspects and wrong on other aspects of the elephant.
• Does one of these groups have a more correct understanding of the one God than others, while the other two are at least trying to worship the same Being.
• Are Jews and Muslims really worshiping Satan, demons, or fantasies, even though they think they are worshiping the one true God?
• Are some Jews and Muslims seeking after the one true God genuinely in their hearts, while being mistaken in their thinking about God? Meanwhile, are some Jews, Christians, and Muslims not truly worshiping the one true God at all in their hearts?

Wheaton's response to her theology was, "While Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, we believe there are fundamental differences between the two faiths, including what they teach about God’s revelation to humanity, the nature of God, the path to salvation, and the life of prayer." Again, this statement is entirely accurate from a Christian perspective.

3. Personally, I feel sympathy as usual all the way around. I respect this faculty member's sense that America is a little out of whack right now in its values. I hope she passes muster in her review.

On the other hand, I would completely agree with the theological statement of Wheaton two paragraphs above. Islam is not an equally true religion to Christianity, at least not from a Christian point of view. Evangelical colleges do not espouse the elephant view above. As a pietist in the Wesleyan tradition, the fourth bullet point above is the one I hope is true. In that case, some Jews and Muslims would be seeking after the one true God of Christian faith, but they would not be understanding him correctly.

I of course feel sympathy for the administration of Wheaton too. Pesky faculty. :-) Always making statements without any consideration of the political implications or consequences, not to mention the impact on the donor base and potential students.

Academic freedom simply is not absolute, and it's foolish for any faculty member to think so. Having a teaching position at a university simply is not a license to say or do whatever you want to say or do.

But then again, her spirit does not seem to be contentious. She sent out a "holy kiss" to those who disagreed with her. :-)

Sectarian Violence in the Middle East

I had the opportunity to go to a luncheon on "Sectarian Violence in the Middle East" on Monday in San Diego, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank out of Washington. It was two panelists and a moderator. One panelist member was Ebrahim Moosa, a professor of Islamic Studies at Notre Dame. The other was Mona Yocubian, who works for USAID.

The two panelists didn't agree on everything, but the moderator was able to pull out some common ground about the current crisis with ISIS and such.

1. The first is that the current situation is more complicated than ever.
I was probably the least informed person in the room. The number of individual groups in the Middle East is mind numbing. It's not just Sunni and Shia. There are Alawites and Hezbollah and all sorts of other gradations. They ally for somethings, pull against each other for others.

Dictators like Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, perhaps even Hosni Mubarak, were oppressive leaders who did/do evil things. But their removal in each case has left a vacuum of group fighting against group that, at least for the moment, seems even worse than before. Who's to say where it will all go?

My Monday reading group (Charles Taylor) has highlighted a complicating factor that wasn't discussed--the impact of modern individualism on the Middle East. Individualism has empowered radical Muslim individuals to leave saner communities and separate into factions of radical individuals like Al-Qaeda.

And as this event indicated, even Middle East experts themselves don't always agree on the analysis or prescription. That puts any US administration in a tough spot, needing to listen to multiple voices before making any decisions.

2. A second is that America and the West need to be very cautious about the way we intervene.
It seems like we push on one problem and two more spring up somewhere else. So we support the removal of Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood takes over. We don't know who to support in Syria. Bashar al-Assad is a bad guy, but the other side has become ISIS, which is a bad guy, maybe even worse.

On the panel, Moosa thought we needed just to stop intervening and to let the situation take its course, to let Saudi Arabia and the other countries of the region fight their own battle. There was vocal support and a significant pocket of clapping around the room for that.

Yocubian, who of course is in the broader Obama administration, took a more nuanced approach and suggested there are many things we can do in terms of aid and such that do not necessarily involve military intervention. She pointed out that Obama has tried to be very careful about intervening and that there are of course many hawks in Congress who think he should be intervening more. I know I thought we probably should have intervened before ISIS took Mosul and took over billions in monetary assets.

Obviously it's very complicated. I get that our intervention almost always seems to create more problems later. But you can't let Hitler take over the world either. Eventually it comes home to roost, when you might at least have nipped something in the bud. Liberals don't like Obama for intervening at all. But, given that he comes from that camp, surely it says something when he intervenes. Surely it says that it was REALLY important to intervene in this case or he wouldn't have done it.

Moosa advocated something like those capitalists who would have us just let an economic crisis play itself out without doing anything about it. Just let the Middle East play itself out and it will eventually right itself.

I disagree, even though I agree we should intervene as little as possible. In economics, I disagree in part because of the three or four years of Hades in destroyed lives. Better five years of moderate economic pain than three years of total decimation. It certainly seems to have worked in the recent economic crisis. How many small groups (like Christians in the Middle East) would be wiped out as the region rights itself?

I disagree secondly because I doubt it really would right itself. There has to be some unifying factor that can transcend factionalism. This is arguably in fact what happened in the origins of Islam. A common deity, a common ethic, a common sense of human worth, allowed rival factions on the Arabian peninsula to come together (of course the expansionary wars against non-Muslims helped too ;-).

3. My notes are at the office, so I don't remember what the moderator's third take-away was. I may have merged it above. I'll make up one that was also clear from the session. :-)

Most of us are way out of our depth on these issues. Policy and decision makers need to be listening to lots of different experts on the Middle East. Inevitably, our leaders have to make these decisions, but they need to make them with fear and trembling, talking to a lot of other people, including the leaders of other countries. We surely need to pray for them. The smartest of the smartest are hardly able to untie these knots.

Quran Burning--not a good idea

Certainly no mature follower of Christ will do such things. There is no ambiguity in Jesus' teaching here. We are to love our enemies. It's Parable of the Good Samaritan stuff--modern Muslims are not unlike Samaritans in the story (although a Mormon might be closer). Of course to equate all Muslims with the Muslims of 9-11 is sheer ignorance on a grand scale anyway.

Only the unaware could burn a Quran today for fun (=not a mature follower) and anyone aware could not burn one in love (=not a mature follower). Thusly, no one who is a mature follower of Jesus Christ will do such things.

But that's not who this post is targeted toward. It is targeted toward non-Christians and the vast majority of nominal Christians in America who do not really know Jesus or follow him, despite their frequent and very vocal "Lord, Lords." It's just not a good idea to provoke people unless you want a fight.

Burning Qurans pushes people who might be our friends and makes them more likely enemies (=stupid). It takes those who already our enemies and inspires them to action (and what's the point there?).

So go ahead, you people who are no smarter than Hamas, the IRA, or any other group that can only function in a tit-for-tat mode. He hit me first. You're no more evolved than the next primate. Go make yourself feel better. Burn a Quran, imbecile.

Mosque Debate

Noticed this Op-Ed in the New York Times today. I'll admit to some mixed feelings on the issue. Here are my ground rules and I'll let you all add or subtract as you wish:

1. If I knew that this mosque would become a symbol of American forgiveness and freedom of religion, I would support it.

2. If I knew that individuals in this mosque would gloat about how they managed to be based so close to 9-11, Ha, stupid Americans, I would oppose it.

3. If I knew that this mosque would inevitably wound the New York psyche, that it couldn't possibly be viewed by them as in #1, ever, then I would regretably want the mosque to be built elsewhere.

So in my view, #1 would be the ideal, especially if Americans could make that its meaning so strongly, even anticipating that there might be some who would opt for #2, that we proudly and defiantly made it be about #1. #1 could also overlay #3.

The problem is that people are people and the primal reaction is extremely strong: "kill anyone with any association whatsoever with my offender, even if it is only in my mind." It is the drive that inevitably justifies genocide. So some natives are nice to me, but then one of my kind slaughters some natives. So some natives slaughter some of my kind so then I feel justified to kill all the natives.

And given how people are--God doesn't make them change so we sure as heck can't--I find myself uncertain about whether the mosque should be built.

Your thoughts?

Allah the Same God?

A teenager once remarked casually to me, "Did you know that the Muslim God may be the same God as the Christian God?"

This question always leaves me with a puzzled look on my face. What is it supposed to mean? I mean, it's not like someone would say, "You know, I thought that there were two gods up there but it turns out that there is really only one!"

A better question would be, "Is the Christian and the Muslim conception of God basically the same?" I suspect this might actually be what the person who asks my lead off question is asking--isn't the Muslim and Christian understanding of God basically the same? Isn't the Bible and the Koran basically the same?

Well, not really. The Christian God includes Christ. If Christ is not a "substantial" part of God for you, then you do not have a historically Christian understanding of God. Any belief that does not believe that Christ was literally God come to earth in a way that could not be true of any other human being does not have the traditional Christian understanding of God.

Similarly, historic Christians believe that Christ, his death in particular, is the only way to get right with God. The Koran and Islam emphatically disagree. So again, anyone who thinks that the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God or religions are pretty much the same is neither a good Christian or a good Muslim, at least not in the historic senses of those words.

Others may have a more sophisticated question in mind (actually, I doubt it or they would have worded the question differently): "Is God like an elephant and the Christians and Muslims are just holding on to different parts of the same animal?" Or maybe someone would believe that Christians and Muslims are both, as far as is humanly possible, reaching toward the same Deity, although both do it from a different starting point.

This is a respectable question, although again, a historic Christian or Muslim has to answer "no." A person who adopts this perspective asks a reasonable question, but if s/he answers yes, then s/he has stepped outside the historic boundaries of either faith. That person might be a sociological Christian or Muslim--they might belong to these groups from a socio-cultural perspective. But they have stepped outside the foundations of their respective faith.

Still others I suspect have never believed in a "real" god in the first place, whether Christian or Muslim. This is the person who may not even realize that their "God-language" is really self-talk. This is the person whose prayers are not really directed at any Being out there at all but are nice little monologs. This is the pastor who preaches to his or her congregation in the prayer, making you think, "Wait, I think God already knows what s/he's saying. I thought s/he was talking to God... Or is he or she really talking to us?"

Some people might ask, "Why should I believe in God?" or "God doesn't talk to me so I don't believe in Him any more."

But either God literally exists outside ourselves or He doesn't. If He does exist, then the answer to the question, "Why should I believe in God" is, "Because He exists." Why should I believe that the car coming at me exists? Maybe I don't want to. Maybe it's not driving where I want it to so I'm not going to believe it's coming toward me.

But the answer to this question hardly depends on what's in it for me. If there's a God; there's a God regardless of what I want to think.

So is the Muslim and Christian God really the same God? If you mean are Muslim and Christian beliefs about God the same, the answer is no. If you mean are both religions basically reaching imperfectly after the same Entity, the answer is no if you are a Christian or Muslim in the historic senses of those words. Will the real Deity accept someone from either religion? Not according to the official positions of both religions, although there are some Christian theologians who have argued for the existence of "anonymous Christians" who have had the right faith despite what they think they have faith in. Are these both just similar subjective projections of human longings, again not if you're a historic Christian or Muslim.

So it looks like the answer is no if you are either a true Christian or Muslim in the historical senses of those terms.