Do We Believe in the Same God?
After wearing a hijab during Advent in support of her Muslim neighbors, Dr. Larycia Alaine Hawkins, professor of political science at Wheaton College, a fundamentalist Baptist university, finds herself placed on administrative leave. The reason for this has nothing to do with the professor’s wearing a hijab, in fact the college supported her doing so. What benched Dr. Hawkins was her Facebook post saying, “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book, and as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”
Wearing a hijab and quoting the pope? No problem. Claiming we all worship the same God? Problem.
It is all too easy for liberals such as myself to lambast Wheaton College and those fundamentalist Christians that attacked Dr. Hawkins on line, but this kind of faux moral outrage begs the real question the professor’s post raised: Do we in fact worship the same God?
Put simply: Is Yahweh the same as the Triune Christian God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), and are these both the same as Allah? To say they are the same is to dismiss or discount as irrelevant the central theological ideas of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Bluntly speaking, the God who dictated the Torah to Moses didn’t have a Son, and neither He nor the God who did have a Son dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, and the God who did dictate the Qur’an neither had a Son nor promised to return the Jews to Palestine, as almost every Palestinian can attest.
My point is that it is wrong and misleading to claim that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God. We don’t. And while our differences should not preclude us from treating one another justly and with compassion—a fact that the Wheaton College administration supports—we should not pretend that our various Gods are all reflections of the one theology–free God of Liberalism.
So I applaud Dr. Hawkins’ act of solidarity, and I salute Wheaton College’s refusal to accept the essentially empty theology of “we all worship the same God.” Is the only way for us to live together in peace to pretend that we don’t believe what we say we believe?
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PS: Just to be clear I don’t believe in any of these three Gods, I simply don’t want to insult those who do by insisting that what they believe doesn’t matter. I believe that religions are human constructs created to provide us with identity, meaning, and comfort regarding the contingencies of life and the inevitability of death. The God I believe in is the God of Spinoza: the God who is all reality.