Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? It’s a question that everyone and his brother was asking on the internet weeks ago, but I could only be late to the discussion if the question had not already been litigated for centuries, so in a broad sense I haven’t yet missed the bus. Naturally, though, I hope to leverage the advantage of having been able to survey various recent responses to the question. It is a topic I have intended to address in light of the online fascination therewith, notwithstanding the inherent intrigue it already possesses, though I am finally provoked in that Mr. Martin invoked this topic in his latest work, and I do appreciate his forthrightness and sharp focus. It will not, therefore, be my intention to undermine his clarity with complexity, but rather to enrich simplicity with specificity.

First, it seems ill-fitting that many popular solutions to this quandary tend to skip right to an analysis of theological overlap in Islam and Christianity’s respective doctrines of God. Apart from its aptitude for the excessive propositionalism I’ve previously addressed, this approach also unfortunately leaves the overarching frame in which the question itself is asked unexamined; namely, what is meant by “worshipping the same God,” exactly.

This approach seems to frequently smuggle in what might be deemed a “postal” metaphysic — not to brand it as insane, though neither to entirely dismiss that possibility — as though worship were like a parcel upon which the identity of God is pasted like an address and, ergo, if the address is incorrect, whether simply misspelled or if the intended recipient in fact does not live at the specified location, the package will fail to reach its target. How much of the identity of God would, on this view, need to be correct in order for the package to arrive at Heaven’s hypothetical doorstep? And how much does that by which Muslims identify “God” overlap with what Christians consider to be the actual object specified?

As many have noted, the overlap is considerable in terms of simple propositional, adjectival, superlative characteristics of “God,” such as omniscience, omnipotence, etc. If God is to be identified purely conceptually, then the differences might be reduced to quibbles over whether the Islamic conception precludes adequate love or makes excessive room for wrath within the character of the deity to align with its supposedly corresponding conception in the Christian faith. This could be reduced ad absurdum to something like a standardized multiple choice test, in which some arbitrary, imaginary, and therefore impossible to designate percentage of correctness would dictate the validity of worship.

This problem extends into the very nature of orthodoxy and heresy within the Christian imagination. If, for instance, every Christian who has an incomplete or incorrect mental notion of the Trinity is thereby incapable of rendering acceptable worship, then there is likely no one who properly worships the “same” God. It does not take much conversation among laity of any denomination to find that seemingly orthodox churches are riddled invisibly with implicit modalism, unitarianism, and the like. The Church does not hold truth in facts, but in mysteries. On some level, if God could be contained within the intellect, He would not be Himself. So, the hypothetical passing grade for the test would conceivably have to be lower than 100%, else grace should cease to be grace. But, again, it is impossible to quantify, much less specify, what “percentage” of propositional truth is requisite for salvation and for right worship, so this line of thinking quickly disintegrates, or else collapses into petty, pharisaic dogmatic legalism. We must not imagine in light of the gospel that St. Peter stands at the pearly gates with a Scantron prepared to condemn with extreme prejudice all the godly C-minus students of theology while clever devils slip under his nose.

I would suggest that heresy should be thought of within the Church little differently than sin. The truth of God is no more relative than morality is, but Romans 14 indicates that the individual’s relationship to morality, by nature of the human subject, possesses an element of subjectivity. It is not the Church’s place nor power to adjudicate the quantity of sin which is sufficient to exhaust God’s grace, nor is it her place to ignore the consequential objectivity of immorality. Let God be the judge, and let the Church fulfill her duty to call to repentance. It is well within such a duty for her to name sin and to declare on authority of God’s self-revelation that unrepentant sin is not the path to life eternal, but to death. In like manner, the Church should avoid making herself the arbiter of the quantity of heresy. It is sufficient for her to name heresy where it exists and to call to repentance, warning of those doctrines which do not lend themselves to a right knowledge of God and therefore threaten to lead away from grace.

Consider the image of a bonfire. The use of this image has obvious limitations, but is nonetheless useful circumstantially. The fire, like truth, objectively exists, even if its appearance, and furthermore the measure of light and warmth participated in, will vary according to the subject’s proximity, and perhaps even the measure of light or warmth necessary will vary depending on extraneous factors of the subject’s nature or temperament. Two individuals may each sit on opposite sides of the fire yet equally close. However, it must also be acknowledged that, at some distance, though rendered ambiguous and indiscernible by the gradation, the warmth of the fire ceases to reach, and at an even further distance even the sight of the fire will vanish. So the goal should be to beckon those who are far from the fire to draw near, so that they can see and live by its life, rather than to squabble over the exact limits of the heat’s radius.

“If any one imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if one loves God, one is known by him.”

Therefore, let us leave behind any notion of doctrine that appropriates the scales of divine justice to human capabilities, relegating ourselves instead to a discussion of the items to be weighed. It is at this point that the divergence between Islam and Christianity becomes both bearable and unbearable: bearable because God is gracious, unbearable because Jesus is Lord. As to the first, we can be sure that God as judge will be just and loving, and that He who alone knows the heart will demand much of those given much. God loves Muslims too and desires that they come to knowledge of the truth — which raises the second point, that Truth is manifest exclusively and particularly in the man Jesus Christ.

This second point is of utmost importance. Propositional truths, facts, do not constitute the essence of the Christian faith, they only express it. It is within the spacious cracks of mystery between the solid facts, therefore, that there is room even for contradictory theological claims between Christian tradition to exist without essentially nullifying either the solidity of the truth or the multiplicity of its expressions. The essence of the faith, rather, is Love, incarnate, revealed, given, returned, in the concourse of ultimately intimate communion between God and His creation. Of course, it is not for no reason that this essence finds its expression in part through even such a propositional articulation as in the preceding sentence. But the statement is not itself central, but rather that which it obtains, uttered from faith to the unutterable heart of grace.

To “worship the same God,” then, so speaking, is only to offer to God that which He chooses to offer first. “We love because He first loved us.” It is only available to the worshipper to be offered because grace has first freely imparted it. That is, this subjective dimension of truth, morality, of “spirituality” broadly, is itself generated by the objective essence of the same. Worship can only reach God via God, “in truth,” yes, but also “in spirit,” and is only therefore received by God as God. Worship is a participation in the self-giving of divine Love, and it is in this way — expressed, not generated, by propositional statements of theological doctrine — that the identity of God is not intellectually obtained in worship, but that God the Father manifestly self-identifies through the body (and blood) of the Son and the through the Spirit. It is God’s effort that infuses human worship with His own identity, not man’s understanding.

This reality is, to the detriment of the affirmative answer to the original inquiry, inherently both sacramental and trinitarian, because the truth of the Trinity, which is in itself an objective expression of God’s identity, inheres in the Blessed Sacrament through the Incarnation, as its objective grace is historically rooted prior to any subjective perception in the reality of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection, upon which the entire Christian faith hangs, and in whom the Church alone finds “grace upon grace.” The Eucharist, the epitome of worship, coalesces as a sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise because it is rooted in this offering of God to God in, through, and by Christ. Pure worship does not merely have God as its end, but as its beginning. It seems, then, that worship is most fundamentally not separable as some sort of discrete part of the eternal life of Christ in the Church. It is more like a descriptor of a particular element which suffuses the very nature of the eternal life, participated in for all eternity as the heavenly Sanctus from Revelation depicts. The thread of worship running through this eternal life can be named, of course, but it cannot be drawn out without unraveling the tapestry of the divine mysteries.

In light of this reframing, the question ought to be: “Does God accept the worship of Muslims?” To which the answer is roughly: “It depends.” And it depends upon God, on His will, His good pleasure, His grace. “The Lord knows those who are his.” He has revealed to us, however, the only Way to Himself, and identified that which participates in His love and that which doesn’t. Therefore, the superior answer is not that God does or does not do this or that, but simply that sin is sin and heresy is heresy, and the Church, “the pillar and bulwark of the truth,” is responsible to call these things what they are, and in so doing to warn of their destructive ends, calling those ensnared in them to repentance, to true faith. No matter how much one knows about fire, or even if one sees it from a distance, it’s heat can only stave off death for those who participate in it’s warmth. The metaphor of the bonfire only works up unto this point: that the eventual separating of the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, is not a gradient, but a decisive bifurcation. It is often those who think they abide in the truth who, in coming so close, stand in the most danger. We must draw near to Christ with fear and trembling, for there is life nowhere else. All disputes of doctrine must revolve around the existential gravity of the Son.

For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So it depends not upon man’s will or exertion, but upon God’s mercy. — Romans 9:15-16 (RSV)

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings. — Hosea 6:6 (RSV)

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired, but a body hast thou prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings thou hast taken no pleasure.” — Hebrews 10:5-6 (RSV)