"I know of no other God except the one called Jesus Christ."
- Martin Luther
Superb post from Fr Al Kimel, on the question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God (as asserted in a recent
lecture by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams):
Archbishop Williams' lecture presumes that Christians and Muslims worship the same God and therefore mean the same thing when they talk about the divine infinity, transcendence, aseity and self-existence. Muslims need not, therefore, regard us as idolaters, despite all of that trinitarian talk about the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. But when we Christians and Muslims describe God as infinite or transcendent, do we in fact mean the same thing?
What is missing in all of this is the man Jesus. We assume that we already know who and what God is, but that we know him just a bit better if we know Jesus. But the doctrine of the Holy Trinity wants to say much more than this. It wants to say that Jesus is himself constitutive of deity.
Each Person of the Trinity can only be understood by us in relation to Jesus Christ:
Father ... is not a metaphor projected by humanity upon the Godhead; it is a proper name and title that designates the divine person who eternally begets Jesus the Son and with whom Jesus exists in eternal relationship...
...we cannot speak about the second person of the Holy Trinity as if he had never become incarnate - born of Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised on the third day, exalted to God's right hand ... The logos asarkos is a theoretical construct. All we truly know is the Word made flesh...
...Jesus is the eternal Son of the Father; God is the divine Father of this Jesus; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of their relationship. And together, in mutually defining relationship and perichoretic union, they are the one God...
This means we cannot have an abstract "doctrine of God" which exists separately from the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:
The narrative of Jesus Christ interprets deity. If this is true, then all of those big words that we use about God - infinity, transcendence, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, aseity, self-existence - must themselves be reinterpreted through this narrative. At no point are we allowed to retreat to a stance of philosophical speculation that ignores the revealed truth that God is Triune.
And this means that, in our dealings with those of other religions, we can never get round the "stone of stumbling and rock of offence" that is the incarnate Son of God, "perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting":
We will always be seen by Islam as idolaters, because we worship Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son, and declare that he is "of one substance" with the Father. No amount of philosophical wheeling-dealing can reduce the offence of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Indeed, if we ever find that our trinitarian proclamation ceases to offend those of unitarian faith, it will mean that we have abandoned the gospel.
So,
do Christians and Muslims worship the same God, or not? Fr Kimel gives what is probably the best answer I've come across to this question:
The answer, I suppose, is still yes; but perhaps we must also simultaneously answer no. I'll give St John [of Damascus], who was scandalized by the Islamic rejection of the Holy Trinity [unlike, one might add, Dr Williams, who seems more concerned to reassure Muslims that our beliefs are really not all that different from theirs], the final word: "Therefore you accuse us falsely by calling us Associators; we, however, call you Mutilators of God."
