Do Jews and Christians worship the same
God? This question might seem rather
silly to any Christian. Of course we
do. The God of the “Old Testament” (or
better put, the “Hebrew Scriptures”) is the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. Well, that of course is the Christian
interpretation. Were I a Jew I would
have a few questions.
In Jewish theology there is no room for
a Trinity of Divine Persons. “Hear O
Israel, the Lord our God is One” (Deut. 6:4), is the key creedal prayer of
Judaism and is known from its Hebrew first words as the Schema Yisrael. It is the
center prayer of both the Morning and Evening Prayer in the Synagogue (equivalent
to our daily offices of the same name or sometimes called Lauds and Vespers). It is the prayer Jewish children are taught
to say before bed and it is the final prayer on the lips of a devout Jew as she
or he surrenders their soul to God. So
while Judaism does speak of the Word of God and of the Breath (Spirit) of God,
there is no room to give them a personality unique from the Creator.
And that is another difference. In the Hebrew Scriptures while God is
sometimes referred to as the Father of Israel, a devout Jew never assumes any
familiarity with him in the way Jesus did (remember, they wanted to kill him
for “making God his Father”) or has taught us to do. God is King.
Master of the Universe.
Lord. Creator. He is not Jesus’s Father or any other
individual’s Father. It is the supreme lèse majesté to address God with such
familiarity and in Jesus day it was even worse—it was blasphemy.
Nor in Judaism is it possible for there
to be any sort of Incarnation of the Divine Person assuming a human
nature. The Incarnation is the rabbinic
equivalent of a square circle, essentially self-contradictory. God is God and humans are human. There is an essential difference between
Creator and creature that cannot be breeched.
In the 80’s, about fifty years after the
Death and Resurrection of Christ, the Rabbis inserted into the daily prayers
known as the Eighteen Benedictions, a “blessing” (actually a curse) on the minim—the heretics or apostates. While not explicitly identifying Christians
as those placed under this “blessing,” historians agree that they were among
the various groups the Rabbis were trying to separate out from the synagogues
for their “unorthodox” beliefs.
Given this history it is surprising that
most Rabbis acknowledge that Christians and Jews worship the same God. It would seem even to me that Christianity
had so changed the understanding of God from our roots in Judaism that we had in
effect “morphed” the God of Israel into a very different Deity. I suspect that some of the ultra Orthodox
(and I mean ultra as in the Hasidim) might think this but they keep
themselves so isolated even from other Jews that if they do it remains unspoken
in inter-faith circles. Orthodox, Conservative,
Reform, and Reconstructionist Jews express no problem that despite the
doctrinal issues relating to Jesus we do in fact worship the same God.
Now to the point: I am not writing about
Jews and Christians at all but rather Christians and Muslims. It is much more clear that Jews and Muslims
worship the same God and if they do then Christians and Muslims obviously
worship the same God.
The name “Allah” is the Arabic for “The
God” (literaly al ilah) to
distinguish Allah from the lesser deities worshiped among the Arab people
before Mohamed. Allah is not unique to
Islam but was used to speak of God by Arab Christians both before and after the
rise of Islam. Christians, including Catholics,
who speak Arabic, even today refer to God as “Allah.”
The Name “Allah” finds its cognates in
other languages spoken by the ancient peoples of the Bible. When speaking Aramaic, his native language,
Jesus would refer to God as Elah—a Name
very closely related to Allah. The Canaanite Name for God, El, was borrowed by several of the
authors of the Old Testament. In Hebrew
God is called Elohim. These Names are all closely related to the
Arabic Name of God, Allah.
When Mohamed devised his new religion of
Islam he rooted it Judaism and Christianity.
As a young man driving camel caravans for his uncle, a merchant, across
Arabia to the markets along the Mediterranean coast in what is today Israel,
Palestine, and Lebanon, he was familiar with both religions. Moreover, it seems that for several months he
lived with a Christian monk who taught him to read and write. This monk apparently was not Orthodox but
belonged to the Nestorian tradition. The
Nestorians believed that in Jesus God did not truly become human but sort of
wore a human body to mask his Divinity. It
gave the young Mohammed a skewed understanding of Christianity and its beliefs,
but he always maintained—and wrote into the Quran—a deep respect for Christian
monks and priests.
His exposure to Judaism and Christianity
led him to the idea that God had first revealed himself to Abraham but over the
centuries the Jews had changed the revelation and strayed from the Truth. So
God sent Jesus to be his prophet and set people right but again, over the
centuries Christians moved away from the Truth, “exaggerating” Christ into a
Divine Person. In the end Mohammed felt
that he was the final prophet who came once and for all with a Revelation that
would not be corrupted.
As a consequence of his exposure to
Christianity Jesus and Mary play a significant role in the Quran. The Quran teaches that Mary was and remained
a virgin through the conception and birth of Jesus. Muslims have a great respect for the Virgin
Mary. I remember being in a procession
in honor of Our Lady in Trapani in Sicily about 20 years ago. While the participants were all Catholics, it
was mainly Muslims who lined the streets respectfully to watch Our Lady’s
statue being carried by.
There are those who want to tell us that
the “Muslim god” is a false god, an idol.
But in fact they know neither their history nor their theology. Yes there is a significant difference in how
we understand God but there is an equivalent difference in how we and Jews
understand God. Whatever divides us one
from another is the work of the Evil One and the sort of bias that slams the
door of authentic commonality between Christianity and Islam is from Satan and
not from God.
The issue, of course, is whether the Abrahamic religions are willing to distinguish between "God" (whom all three traditions acknowledge and whom they all consider to be apophatically beyond description) and "God-concept" (where they of course kataphatically differ). With respect to Judaism I would suggest an encounter with the British and admittedly contrarian exegete Margaret Barker and in particular her work The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God. The following brief description is culled from the Internet:
ReplyDelete"Many of the old certainties have been destroyed by new knowledge. What has become clear to me time and time again is that the evidence indicates that pre-Christian Judaism was not monotheistic in the sense that we use that word. Many in first century Palestine retained a world view derived from the more ancient religion of Israel, in which there was a High God and several Sons of God, one of whom was Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel. Yahweh the Lord could be manifested on earth in human form, as an angel, or in the Davidic king. It was as a manifestation of Yahweh, the Son of God, that Jesus was acknowledged as Son of God, Messiah and Lord."
As for Islam, the belief in a pre-existent heavenly Qur'an (which parallels Judaism's notion of a heavenly Torah) seems to me to be the place where an interreligious dialogue with Christianity might prove fruitful with its belief in the preexistent Logos). Of course, they differ in that one became a Book, the other a Code, and the last a Human Being.
Merry Christmas!
this is extremely interesting thank you very much
DeleteI had the idea, not too simplistic I hope, that while Jews await the Messiah, and Christians have the Messiah, Muslims have their Messiah in the Koran - that is, the Koran puts right the broken Covenant.
ReplyDelete