Posted on 03/26/2013 6:56:09 AM PDT by NYer
Last week, Pope Francis received a collection of world religious leaders in his first ecumenical and interreligious event. His address to them contained diplomatic niceties and specific expressions of good will aimed at Orthodox, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims.
His remarks to the latter recognized that Muslims “worship the one living and merciful God, and call upon him in prayer.” In this he echoed the 1964 dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium, which gave a nod to “the Mohammedans, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.”
Now, both Lumen Gentium 16 and Pope Francis’s words have a pastoral rather than doctrinal purpose. Their aim is to build interreligious bridges by generously acknowledging whatever can be found to be true in other faiths—not to make precise pronouncements about their theology. That said, Lumen Gentium is an exercise of the ordinary Magisterium, and even casual statements from a pope (be it this one from Francis or similar ones made by his predecessors) shouldn’t be taken lightly.
So, what does it mean to say that Muslims adore the one God along with us—to say, as can be reasonably drawn from these statements, that Muslims worship the same God as Catholics? We can consider the idea in several senses.
I think we can say with confidence that any monotheist who calls out to the Lord is heard by the Lord, whether it’s a Muslim, a pagan philosopher seeking the God of reason, or a Native American petitioning the Great Spirit. As Lumen Gentium 16 continues, God is not “far distant from those who in shadows and images seek [him].”
Likewise I think we’re on solid ground in saying that the subjective intention of Muslims is to worship the one God—moreover, the one God from the line of Abrahamic revelation. Whether or not their version of that revelation is authentic or correct, that’s what they “profess to hold” to. Furthermore, some of the attributes of the God to whom they address their worship are comparable to the Christian God’s: He is one, merciful, omnipotent, and the judge of the world.
Just as clearly, though, we cannot say that the God in whom Muslims profess to believe is theologically identical to the Christian God. For the most obvious example, their God is a “lonely God,” as Chesterton put it, whereas ours is a Trinity of persons. Beyond that difference, in the divine economy our Gods are also quite different: most pointedly in that ours took human nature to himself and dwelt among us on earth, whereas the Muslim God remains pure transcendence. To Muslims the idea of an incarnation is blasphemy.
And so perhaps we can distinguish between worship of God and belief in him, the former being more about the intent of the worshiper and the latter being more about the object of belief himself. Thus could Gerhard Müller, bishop emeritus of Regensburg and since last year the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, assert in 2007 that Muslims and Christians “do not believe in the same God,” and yet not contradict any magisterial teaching.
Of course, Jews believe in an utterly transcendent and “lonely” God, too; the idea that Jesus was God’s son, Yahweh incarnate, was likewise blasphemous to the Jews of his day. Is their theology as deficient as Islam’s? Ought we to put them in the same category as Muslims: subjectively worshiping the one God but believing in him, as least partly, in error?
Well, at least one difference suggests itself. Muslims “profess” to hold to the faith of Abraham but really don’t; their version of Abrahamic faith is false. (Of course, they believe that our version is the false one, a corruption of the Qur’an.) Jews, on the other hand, know and believe in their God according to his authentic self-revelation—what they have received from him is true, just incomplete. To be fully true, Jewish theology just needs to be perfected by Christian revelation, whereas, although we can identify many truths in it, Islamic theology needs to be broken down, corrected, rebuilt from an authentic foundation.
Now, it can be a bad practice to judge ideas by their sources. But if, as Benedict XVI has said, faith is at root a personal encounter with God, then the authenticity of God’s personal revelation of himself is of the utmost importance. In other words, the source of God-knowledge becomes the very question. We worship and believe in God because and to the extent that we know him. And we know him, above all other reasons, according to how he revealed himself to us.
In this sense, then, I suggest that we can correctly say that Jews worship and believe in a God who is qualitatively truer, closer to the God of Christianity, than the God of Islam. Both Jews and Muslims lay claim to the same revelation, but where Jews have an accurate record of it (and thus of the God it reveals) Muslims have a fictionalized adaptation.
This question of the theological similarities and differences between Christianity and Islam is perhaps more important than it ever has been. With religious folk of all kinds increasingly beset by secularism and moral relativism, we look across creedal lines for friends and allies—comrades-in-arms in the fight for unborn life, traditional marriage and morality, religious rights, and a continued place for believers in the cultural conversation. It can be an encouragement and a temptation, then, to look at Islam and see not warriors of jihad against Arab Christians and a decadent West, but fellow-soldiers of an “ecumenical jihad” against an anti-theist culture.
Can Islam be that reliable ally? (Shameless product plug alert.) That’s the subject of the newest book from Catholic Answers Press: Not Peace but a Sword by Robert Spencer. The evidence he presents will help us understand Islam’s God more clearly, and make us examine more shrewdly the prospects for any future alliance with followers of the Prophet.
You have excellent copy/paste skills. Thank you for not changing any of my wording.
Has what I said I believed, not been clear? You read it, what questions do you still have?
You ask....what questions do you still have?
How do you define right from wrong?
I haven’t been evasive, I’ve explained it a number of times, haven’t I? It’s nothing more than what I said. Conscious and 62+years of life.
I’m working on an autobiography, but it won’t be in print for a while. I’ll reserve a copy for you.
At this time, suffice it to say that what I’ve been blessed by God with and my life’s experience is all I got.
Intuition/gut feeling I guess, although I will admit the question really just doesn’t ever come up. I do what I do, and so far, nothing bad has ever happened.
As I said earlier, that is why I am always thankful to God for making me who I am.
Perhaps I have a guardian angel?
You may trade them in for one great big splat of a rude remark at any time.
Ping me, OK?
WOW! That is 87 1/4th more stickers than I received in my entire Sunday School career! And sparkly, too!
Your kindness is only exceeded by your good looks and gentle manners. Say hi to the hub for me.
:D
; )
I have asked the question, of which you invited...therefore saying perhaps you have a guardian angel is evading that question.... So I’ll repeat it in case you have misunderstood....
How do you define right and wrong? Perhaps better asked...Do you believe that people sin..and that against God?
Ping to my better, nicer half. (I was going to say 5/8, but actually we are fairly evenly matched:)
#164
No, I don’t believe we can offend Him. I don’t even believe our concept of sin is of any significance to Him.
You stated when I asked if you believe we can sin against God..............”No, I don’t believe we can offend Him... I don’t even believe our concept of sin is of any significance to Him.”
How did you determine this?
I thought about it a lot and used #164, with perhaps some help from #165.
Then how do you explain death ?
What do you mean? It’s the end of the body, after that, I have no idea.
Well, I’m asking how come we die........How do you explain that this happens to our bodies?
You do seem to believe in God Stuart...but after death we live on regardles of what ones beliefs are...’all do’...it’s not over just because our bodies hit the dust.
I say this because God designed us for Eternity...the life we have here is temporary. So something happened that caused death to come....what do you think that was?
Google “General Education Board”, along with the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.
I guess anything that’s made of matter, is eventually going to wear out.
In case you need to ask me what our soul is made of, I don’t know and I don’t know what happens after death either.
You know, your questions are getting a little weird. I’m going to bed, be back in the morning.
Thanks for the insight. Many people think like he does. I sense they have a feeling of virtue in believing in everything, not making a judgment. There is One God seems “narrow.” All I was trying to do is get him to realize the non-rationality of this type of “anything-is-true” viewpoint. We can’t live our lives that way on other levels, like “if I drop this egg, will it land on the floor or the ceiling?” It’s one or the other. So, it’s really sad that this keeps them from knowing the One True God and the Only Savior. Happy Easter to all!
Never-the-less, I wish you well. You might want to read F.Schaefer’s “The God Who is There” and maybe Greg Koukl’s “Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air.” And let me say again, I wish you well, Stuart.
Thanks
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