Christians and Muslims must not rush into agreement about God

This will wrongfoot some of Rowan's critics (and rightly so). Having been touching on matters of interfaith, especially Muslim, interaction over the last term in the classroom, I'm more conscious of how much work there is to do in the Christian Community on this. And, given the uncanny parallels there often appear to be between popular Muslim and popular Christian reactions to such matter, I suspect the same is true of the Muslim communities too.

What I came up against amongst my mainly evangelical-background students was a tendency to be uncomfortable with the notion that Allah and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Chriat might be the same. Now this was only articulated by a minority, but it was a bigger minosrity that I expected.

In some cases I think that what lay behind the reluctance were two main things. One of them is the teaching that is going on in some quarters of the evangelical world that says that Allah is the name of the Arabian moon God and that the the Ka'aba is the centre of idolatry.

This is just lazy prejudicial thinking at heart and it ignores the experience of Christians who use Arabic and languages who draw religious terminlolgy from Arabic (like Malay, Indonesian languages, Urdu etc) who emlpoy the term 'Allah' among others. Etymologically, 'Allah' is from the same semitic root as underlies 'Elohim' (which is a plural form) which is one of the normal Hebrew Bible terms for God.

Ther is a theological rejoinder which I think is decisive: Allah for Arabic sspeaking Christians is the creator of the universe, ditto for Muslims and (I imagine) at least some Arabic-speaking Jews. How many creators can there be? These can't all be different. This is strengthened by noting that all three faiths understand themsleves to look to the God of Abraham. Rowan is quoted in the article as saying, “The name ‘God’ is not the name of a person like a human person . . . ‘God’ is the name of a kind of life, a ‘nature’ or essence — eternal and self-sufficient life, always active, needing nothing.” How many of those can there be?

Now comes another issue: worship. We all claim to worship 'Allah'/Eloah/him,/The One. I think that the problem for some is that there is a view that if one is not Christian, one must be worshipping something that is not God. I'm not sure that this is warranted by the whole counsel of scripture which does seem to recognise worship of the true God by others outside of God's chosen people.

Conceptually we may need to be prepared to recognise several related issues: one is that the relationship between worship and salvation/knowing God needs exploring and not simply collapsing. Another is to note that there are dificulties around finite human beings conceptualising and naming God.

Latter first (because they are related, I believe): we can never fully express God in human concept and language; God will always be more and other. Worse, if we fall into the all-too-easy trap of treating our conceptualisations of God as definitive, we have fallen into idolatry: worshipping as God something that is not God, namely our own conceptions. So we have a quandary: there is only One 'eternal and sel-sufficient life' but that description is not going to be enough to keep us from idolarty in the mind.

We can only rely on God's gracious willingness to relate to us; in a sense to stand forward of the conceptualisations me may have of God, to allow God to give them, so to speak, three dimensions in our experience rather than the two that we began with. This means God being/becoming not a passive recipient of our worship but an active courter of it and indeed opening up a relating to us that allows us to enter worship. For me, as you may begin to appreciate, a trinitarian understanding is the best sense to be made of being called to worship yet likely to fail to conceive adequately of God so as to avoid idolatry of/in the mind. Only if God is prepared not only to relate to us, but make Gods own self available to us can worship be both true and have salvific significance. Otherwise we may look but not, in a sense, touch: we may worship but not connect.

I have, of course, not gone down the road of considering how this relates to the Cross. And I can't now go into my thoughts about that. Suffice to say, of now, that I think that the Cross is precisely where God opens Godself up to us and takes the gracious initiative to step forward from the pattern of our inadequate conceptualising and create real relationship with a living essence that is God.

I commend Rowan's speech as a very helpful step forward in dealing with the real issues that we need to. In addition, it looks to me like he has managed to steer through and past the traps for the unwary. I'll need to look again to be sure, but that's how it seems.

See also Word doc here.