What’s In a Name?

Are the names “God” and “Allah” interchangeable?  Do Christians and Muslims in fact worship “the same God”?

When the syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker writes about religion and society, she tends to be right on the mark.  It must cost her dearly in the present atmosphere of myopic “tolerance” and abusive political correctness.  As she and a few other brave souls have pointed out, Western culture today embraces any and every form of religious persuasion, as long as it is not Christian, while it condemns as politically incorrect those who suggest that there might be a right way and a wrong way, an “orthodoxy” that refuses to bless heresy, relativism and the demonic.

A column of Parker’s from August, 2007, takes on those, including a Roman Catholic bishop in the Netherlands, who favor substituting the name “Allah” for “God” in Christian worship services.  As the hierarch pointed out, Catholic priests in Indonesia already use the name “Allah” in celebrations of the Mass, so why shouldn’t we all?  In answer, Parker quotes a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations who insisted that such a move would not require a theological leap for Christians, since “It reinforces the fact that Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the same God.”  After reciting a litany of atrocities committed in the Netherlands by militant Islamists, Parker suggests that “one could begin to think of invoking Allah as a savvy survival technique.”  A little later on she makes the point that “Christians and Muslims don’t really worship the same God.”

This is a point that should be obvious.  Those of us who have had the opportunity to visit a synagogue (at least an Orthodox one) or pray with a pious Jewish family have likely sensed and appreciated the strong continuity that exists between the Hebrew Scriptures (our Old Testament) and Christian tradition.  This is not the place to argue the point, but to me it seems clear that Orthodox Jews and Orthodox Christians (not to mention many other Jews and Christians of other theological tendencies) do indeed worship the same God.  The content of their respective faiths is, of course, very different.  While pious Jews await the coming of the Messiah, Christians are convinced – they know in the depths of their soul – that Messiah has already come.

He has come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, whom we also believe and confess to be the eternal Son of God, one of the Holy Trinity.  This is by no means a minor difference.  But it does not alter the fact that the God of Jesus, the disciples and ourselves is one and the same as the God of Moses, Isaiah and John the Baptist.

The same can hardly be said, however, of Allah and the God who reveals Himself in the Holy Bible, as well as in the tradition of the Church.  While Muslim faithful may hold Jesus to be a great prophet, their true endtime figure is the Mahdi, who will bring (Islamic) justice to the earth, but who in no way participates in divine life or being (the very idea is blasphemous!).  This, together with the related point that the quranic image of Allah totally excludes any form of trinitarian theology, makes it evident that Allah, as proclaimed and experienced by persons of Islamic faith, is simply not the God known and worshiped by Christians.

Islam today is in a tortured period of its existence, largely because it seems to so many faithful Muslims and non-Muslims alike to have been co-opted by radical Islamists.  Insofar as “Allah” condones and even urges suicide bombings and other acts of wanton violence, then he is a caricature of the God of Islam.  The great majority of Muslims surely know that to be true (although it’s incomprehensible that they have not more emphatically denounced those who have so distorted the Quran’s image of Allah, and condemned those whose actions belie their faith and bring opprobrium on Islam generally).

Yet even there where Muslims remain faithful to their religious heritage, including its calls for peace and tolerance, an unbridgeable gulf exists between Allah and the Christian God.  By searching our respective scriptural sources carefully, we may find a significant number of characteristics that both of those sources, the Quran (with the Hadith or collection of sayings of the Prophet Mohammad) and the Bible, attribute to the Supreme Being.  The radical monotheism of Islam, however, (which some have described as belief in the “singularity” rather than in the “unity” of God) leaves no place for the one, triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who share the same divine nature while existing as three distinct and unconfused Persons.  Persons who dwell in an eternal communion of love that overflows the limits of divine life, to embrace the whole of humankind.

For a Christian, neither creation nor redemption can be understood apart from the “economy” effected by the three divine Persons of the one Godhead.  That economy, however, “God ad extra,” reflects the reality of inner trinitarian being, “God ad intra.”  If God in His innermost reality is not the Father, the unique monarch, source or wellspring of all existence, both human and divine, who brings all things from nothing into being and from death to life through His “two hands,” the Son and the Holy Spirit, then “creation” is a product of mere natural, random causes, and “redemption” is a pipe-dream, a fantasy born of wishful thinking.

But we know this is not true.  The triune God is both Creator and Redeemer.  He is incarnate Love, present in the world and in the community of the faithful, the Church.  Revealing Himself through works of love and acts of (authentic) martyrdom – martyrdom supremely exemplified by the Cross and continued in the life and experience of the faithful down through the ages – this God teaches us by example to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies, to honor and defend widows and children, to feed the poor, and to heal the sick.  This God calls us, through ascetic struggle, repentance, prayer and charity, along a pathway that leads to eternal communion in the Kingdom of His beloved Son.  He is the God who, by suffering and dying, then rising from the depths of hell and ascending into heaven, lifts us up as well out of our own hell, our own death, and gives us a share in His transcendent life.  He is the God who loves us, who redeems us, and who saves us, providing for us joy and blessedness in everlasting communion with Himself.

He is the God before whom every knee in heaven, on earth, and under the earth will one day bend in ceaseless praise and adoration.  He is the God who, by His voluntary and loving self-sacrifice on our behalf, raises us from death and corruption, and transforms us into His own glorious image.

“The Lord is God, and has revealed Himself to us!”  His Name is Kyrios, Lord and God.  That Name expresses the fullness of divine Life and Love.  This is why it should never be confused with any other name, either in heaven or on earth.