By this argument, which I do understand, there exists a “real” God and anyone who accepts the general idea of a Supernatural Superpower is worshiping the same “real” God. Might as well toss Pele and Krishna into the mix under the general assumption that as humans we are just doing our best to adulate the right guy.
I get that, but as I noted above, by definition Wheaton’s statement of faith denies expansion of ecumenism to include deities beyond their statement of faith. That’s the whole point of making faculty sign the statement.
We are talking past each other because you and others insist on ignoring the fundamental consideration here: What does the Wheaton statement of faith require as the definition of which exact God to believe in if you want to be employed as faculty?
In the Wheaton construct, you do not get to have a personal opinion of what God is all about which contradicts the statement of faith. You must sign a statement of faith that it is your personal belief that God is this exact guy spelled out in the statement of faith.
There is no epistemologic debate here, nor is there wiggle room on the definition of Wheaton’s God as the triune God.
I’m solidly in agreement with Wheaton (and with Chief Pedant here, in that I don’t think Muslims and Christians worship the same God. The primary properties of the Christian God are that the Godhead is a Trinity, and that the Second Person of that Trinity became incarnate in Jesus Christ. Muslims (and Jews) deny both of those premises. Therefore, I don’t think it’s the same God, though I’m open to being convinced otherwise.
The complexity here is that Christians have always been somewhat divided about how to view the Old Testament. I lean at least partway to the position of the Marcionites and some of the gnostics, in that I don’t think the Old Testament portrays a consistent picture of God, and in particular the God depicted in Genesis is (to my mind) totally incompatible with the God that became incarnate in Jesus Christ. In that sense, I think it’s fair to say that Christians and Jews don’t worship the same God either.
Christians are not a ‘people of the book’ in the relevant sense. Our faith doesn’t center around a book (there were Christians before there was a New Testament), it centers around a person. There is no Christian equivalent to the Quran.
They did on the other hand have to deal with early Christian sects who held (like Islam) that Jesus was a great prophet and not God. The Apostle John said, he who denies the Son has not the Father, so I think it’s clear what they would have thought of Islam.
Having said that, I’m quite sympathetic to the gnostic line rather than the ‘orthodox’ one, so I’m fairly comfortable with the idea that Jews and Muslims worship a different entity that isn’t the (true) Trinitarian God.
The problem here is that this puts you outside the mainstream of Christian thinking - which is pretty clear on one point: that the god of the Christians is ‘the same’ as the god of the Jews - it is just that the Jews did not get the memo about Jesus.
Look at it this way: in 100 BC, of course no Jesus existed (or rather, none was manifest to humans) - but, presumably, god did exist (assuming you believe in such an entity, it did not pop into existence on the birth of Jesus). Christians - at least, the mainstream - believe that this “god” was correctly identified by the Jews, and is, in fact, the god of the Old Testament.
Then along comes Jesus, and (to Christians) this advent enriched, complicated, or explained further the nature of god. Jews of course refused to accept this new teaching … but that did not mean that they suddenly started worshipping a different god than they had before Jesus was revealed to humans. It isn’t the god that “changed” (again, according to Christians), it is that the Jews’ understanding of that god - the same god - was deficient, or too simplistic, in that they refused to accept a new set of teachings about his nature.
What changed is not god (for believers, god is eternal and unchanging), but human understanding of him. Christians believe they have a better understanding of the very same god as was originally worshipped by the Jews prior to the birth of Jesus. Muslims also believe they have a better understanding than both Jews and Christians. Jews believe Christians and Muslims are adding unnecessary and incorrect additions to this understanding, and Christians feel the same way towards Muslims.
Even from an orthodox Christian point of view, that’s not correct. It is logically impossible for any entity to exist that has the properties of the Christian god as well as the Muslim god. (This is not limited to the two big issues of Incarnation & Trinity, there are other differences as well. My understanding is that divine voluntarism plays a bigger role in Sunni Islam than in orthodox Christianity, for example).
The early Christians believed that God had become incarnate in Jesus Christ, and most of them then identified that God with the Jewish God. Early Muslims believed that God had dictated the Quran to Muhammed, and they identified the God who had done so with the Jewish God. It’s possible for either the Christians or the Muslims to be wrong of course about the identity between their god and the Jewish god. (I think orthodox Christianity is somewhat inconsistent on that front, but set that aside). What’s clear is that they can’t both be right, because the propositions that Christianity and Islam make about God are utterly incompatible.
Of course. However, that’s not the claim. No-one is actually saying that the one true god has the properties attributed to it by both Christians and Muslims.
The claim is that one or another group (or perhaps both) is incorrect in their understanding of the nature of the one, true god. And in light of the Pope’s recent statement (see below), even that is putting it too harshly.
Actually … for the largest population of Christians in the world (namely, Catholics), this is 100% wrong - and I can prove it. Their leader has recently published an official statement confirming that the Jews and Catholics can both, in fact, be “right” at the same time - despite their differences - and that they both worship the very same god.
I assume, purely for the sake of argument, that you recognize the current Pope as “Christian” and the Catholic faith as a “Christian” religion. Here’s his own recently-published analysis of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism:
Perhaps, but the larger point is that it doesn’t matter. Muslims and Christians can both claim to worship the same God and both can claim to know better than the other the true nature of that god. They don’t have to agree about anything.
You are doubly mistaken. First, when Muslims say Christians are “People of the Book,” they do not mean that their faith centers around it, it’s just an idiom meaning that they worship the same God (of Abraham). Baptists and Methodists, among other denominations, are fine with the term.
Second, many Christian denominations DO believe that the Bible is the sole and final authority. No, they don’t worship it the way they worship Jesus, but it is entirely fair to say that their faith centers around it, since it is their sole source of knowledge about Jesus, and sola scriptura was a fundamental tenet of the Reformation.
At Wheaton in particular, a professor was terminated in 2004 after he announced that he was converting to Roman Catholicism, and in the dispute over his termination, the president of Wheaton said it was precisely the Catholic belief that the sacred tradition and Magisterium of the Church shared authority with the Bible that made it impossible for a Catholic to embrace Wheaton’s Statement of Faith, as interpreted by Wheaton, even though the professor in question strongly disagreed that anything in the statement was incompatible with his understanding of Catholicism.
In light of this, I think it’s safe to say that Wheaton will do whatever it wants with regard to profs who seem soft on Islam.
This is not true for every Christian denomination. Many “sola scriptura” denominations exist, and they hold that the Bible is the only source of truth.
À propos of this tangent, some scholars like Seyyed Hossein Nasr have proposed that in Islam what corresponds to Jesus in Christianity is the Qur’an—because both of them are equally termed the Word of God (kalimat Allah). Likewise, the Islamic analogue of Blessed Virgin Mary is Muhammad—because each of them produced the Word of God from a pristine source, Mary being a virgin and Muhammad being unschooled (ummi). Carrying this further, the Gospel’s analogue in Islam would be not the Qur’an but the Hadith corpus, both consisting of narratives about the life and deeds of the founding figures and their disciples.
Even if this analysis sounds outlandish at first, I think it’s an interesting way to look at it, because it finds a basis for comparisons on a deeper level than the surface appearances. Just sayin.
The ONLY issue here is whether the Wheaton statement of faith excludes the God of Islam. Since the Qur’an itself specifically excludes the triune God described in the Wheaton statement of faith, Hawkins would have to resolve that conflict to defend herself.
She will not be able to do that within any ordinary reading of what the plain text of the statement of faith says. Contortions such as the one you present above will not do it, since the Qur’an itself denies the trinity. In any case, it is clear from her public statements that she is done trying, so either she is not articulate enough to compose a defense, not knowledgeable enough to understand why her statement is at issue with the statement of faith, or has simply lost interest in defending the point and teaching at Wheaton.
Because she is black and the issue brings in both women and Muslims, how to dismiss her is sensitive. The solution will be to offer her a settlement. She will accept that, and will leave quietly (which the settlement will require).
The next big news on this will be that Wheaton and Dr Hawkins have reached an agreement, and that she has elected to resign her position.
The Wheaton statement of faith will continue to require an explicit acceptance of the trinity, and the deity of Jesus Christ. That is simply not negotiable for them.
I wonder - according to the Wheaton statement of faith, do Catholics now “worship the same god”? After all their leader, the Pope, has expressly stated that Catholics worship the same god as the Jews … who, just like Muslims, deny the trinity.
If someone who is “wrong” about the nature of god can nevertheless worship the same god … well, that puts the Wheaton analysis in some doubt.
The more specific parallel would be those Christian denominations which hold to plenary verbal inspiration of the Bible (as well as a God-directed mechanism by which it was put together, although I note many of these same denominations have no clue how the Bible was put together ).
Since the Qur’an is generally accepted by Muslims to be the words of God relayed through Mohammed and recorded by his scribes, the parallel for denominations accepting plenary verbal inspiration is nearly the same: the words in the original texts reflect the mouth of God and not the musings of the actual writers.
Islam has a better story for this because of the mechanics of how the Qur’an was created, but the idea is the same.
With both texts, the dilemma is that the content is so disorganized and so loosely structured, that nearly any interpretation is do-able with enough creativity.
Which is why the debate at hand is not about the Bible v the Qur’an, nor Christian theology v Islamic theology.
It’s about the Wheaton statement of faith’s triune God, versus a statement in the Qur’an that denies the triune God (and other differences, but this is the easy one).
Since one insists on a triune God, and the other denies a triune God, it’s an uphill road (which Dr Hawkins will not climb) to convince Wheaton their statement of faith is not at odds with the God in the Qur’an.
I think the larger story is the implications of requiring professors to adhere so tightly to such a narrow statement of faith- one that fires people for even fairly common musings.
To me, that isn’t strength of faith. It’s weakness. And it’s not intellectual curiosity. IMHO, it all reflects pretty poorly on Wheaton.
Yes - but that addresses a totally different issue: whether Catholics could sign the Statement of Faith. Not whether Catholics worship the same god.
It is entirely possible for two groups to have a totally different faith, yet worship the same god. As the link itself notes, many evangelical Protestants would not agree with the “Statement of Faith”:
[emphasis added]
Presumably, whether someone can “sign off” on the Statement of Faith isn’t the same as whether they ‘worship the same god’. Unless one posits a multiplicity of gods worshipped by various flavors of evangelical Protestantism.
I agree, it’s just that the “last unread post” thing doesn’t work that well, and I sometimes miss posts at the very bottom of the page, so I thought you might want to read it.
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