If you pick up the thread earlier, you will see that there is a difference between affirming the God the Father, and denying the Trinity.
In the bizarre sequence of added revelations, each subsequent guy can lay claim to the prior believer’s God, with modifications. But the inverse does not work. You may take my God, add some stuff, and claim you are worshiping the same guy. I may refuse to accept your God because he’s not the one I had and I don’t want mine changed.
So Christians can lay claim to worshiping Yahweh while Jews say the triune Christian God is not Yahweh. And Muslims can lay claim to worshiping the Abrahamic God the Father while Christians say Allah is not their triune God.
And so it goes, until we learn that theological debate and a plea for consistency are hopeless tasks for made-up stuff.
That’s why the ONLY thing at issue here is whether the Wheaton statement of faith specifying a triune God is at odds with the Qur’an denying a triune God. It is.
This is news to the Jewish people. it must explain the strange american evangelical christian movement of ‘the jews for jesus’ and much of the gross hypocrisy.
Standard operating procedure for this person, the strawman arguments advanced, elaborated, asserted and built into towers
Hell yes it is. The most fundamental Jewish prayer, the Sh’ma, is “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” The single and undivided nature of God is one of the basic tenets of Judaism.
As others have pointed out, the “undivided and singular” nature of the Jewish god is sorta central to Judaism. As far as trinity-renouncers go, Jews are champs.
The god worshipped by Muslims is pretty explicitly the Jewish god, so if the god of the Jews exists within the trinity, so does the god of the Muslims.
(The guy described in this link is not the inventor of this theory, just one of its proponents. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are dolts in the theology department at Wheaton College who ascribe to it.)
Sorry if this has already been mentioned in this thread.
Where in Wheaton’s statement of beliefs, or anywhere in mainstream Christian belief canons is this idea laid out? Sure there have been countless offshoots and sects, that have modified the faith in ways “mainstream” Christianity are errant to some degree, many to the point of considering them inspired by satan (starting from the very beginning of “mainstream” Christianity). But it was always accepted that the members of those sects are actually attempting to worship the same god as mainstream Christianity, no matter how bizarre and errant their beliefs (and likewise for what the members of those sects think about mainstream Christians).
But the point of the contention (lack of triune nature) is not something Muslims modified, its something that they share with Jews. So if you claim a lack of triune nature makes the Muslim a different God, it must follow that the Jewish God is a different God, and that goes against most of the New Testament.
Of course exactly the same thing is said by protestants about the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary and the pre-Christian cult of Diana.
Seeing as Muslims literally begin their prayers with “the God of Issac and the God of Abraham” it would take a serious modification of Christian teachings to claim they are not worshipping the same God as Christians. That claim seems like it would enough be departure from the Christian mainstream to warrant being thrown out of Wheaton (FTR I don’t think any public supported school school should be able to sack people because of their religious beliefs but that’s a whole different thread)
??
The Basmallah is In the Name of God the Merciful and the Compassionate.
in any case it remains very simple, if the evangelicals of the USA think that the JEwish God is the same as theirs, there is no logical exclusion of the Islamic conception, for while we and the Jews can disagree on many of the details (and there are stupid disputes and even stupider and wronger violence over any disagreements), we have agreed for 1400 years that we share the common and profound idea of the Unicity of God.
It is just bizarre to see the assertion that Jews do not “specifically” reject the trinity idea… (or maybe the weaseling word is “renouncing”? which would be even more hyporcrital usage, is it not the false witnessing?)
(in any case the real answer I am sure is in the reality it is for the americans evengalicals politically incorrect to be anti-jewish now, but they can transfer the same old prejudices to another minority)
She hasn’t been fired, but is on administrative leave. A process to fire her will begin during which she has a chance to clarify her positions.
I think–based on news reports–that what she is doing is refusing to defend her position, period. I would suspect that she has made statements which Wheaton considers contrary to their statement of faith, and has probably (if she’s a typical professor there) at other times made statements affirming the Trinity and the general statement of faith. It would be silly to go to work for Wheaton and not generally accept it.
So I think what Wheaton is asking for is a formal defense outside of tweets and Facebook of just exactly what she meant by any “same God” comments, or any other comments made which Wheaton thinks is at odds with their statement of faith.
I think I posted earlier that I have no idea what she thinks, and you or someone else said I was being disingenuous. But I’m not. I don’t pretend to be privy to her particulars (although I know the evangelical world well).
What I keep saying is not her position. I just keep saying that Wheaton considers Islam’s tenets to be in opposition to the Wheaton tenet that Jesus is fully God.
I believe the current impasse is that Wheaton wants her to answer specifically and clearly the concerns her comments have raised, and she is apparently refusing to do that. One suspects there may be a little disinclination due to past simmering contentions not as publicly heralded? Who knows…
Per the Chicago Tribune today: "On the part of the College, further theological clarification is necessary before such reconciliation can take place, and unfortunately Dr. Hawkins has stated clearly her unwillingness to participate in such further clarifying conversations,” the college said in a statement. “This represents an impasse on our efforts toward reconciliation.”
I certainly don’t claim any inside knowledge either, but perhaps if she stated her actual beliefs, she would be in some smallish degree of conflict with Wheaton’s Statement of Faith, and so she’s basically been given a choice between lying about her beliefs and being dismissed.
Of course it’s bizarre. The biggest mistake you can make here is to try to make sense of theology.
I think the Jews reject the deity of Christ, and the Trinity. They don’t worship Jesus as God any more than do the Muslims. So we can say that Jews do not worship the same God as Evangelicals.
But we can’t say the reverse, because Evangelicals take that starting point (Yahweh), add some revelations, claim it’s the same God the Father, with additional revelations that there is a triune God (buried in OT texts, btw, by their thinking). Therefore Evangelicals claim the same God as Jews even though Jews do not claim the same God as Evangelicals.
OK, Mohammed comes along with yet additional revelations, this time specifically denounce the Trinity but affirming Yahweh. So Muslims get to say their God is the same Yahweh guy. They can’t and don’t say their God is the same Jesus guy.
LOL. I’m not making this up, but this is what happens when you just make religious beliefs de novo. Nothing is consistent and whatcha got is a bunch of nutcases all arguing their theology as if they own the Truth. It’s risible.
But there is no sense in which Evangelicals deny the deity of Christ, nor the separation of Christ from being truly God. And there is no sense in which Muslims accept the deity of Christ.
Nor are Evangelicals inclined to extend the same ecumenism toward Islamic beliefs, which were made up after Christianity made up the trinity, as they are to extend some ecumenism toward Jews, who made up everything first. Nobody minds making up their own shit based on the last guy, but nobody likes the new guy on the block messing with their beliefs.
Next thing you know some guy named Smith is gonna get a brand new revelation in these Latter Days and try to trump everyone who went before…
But they’re faking it! Or they don’t know their own religion! Or, or…they’ll come up with something. It’s religion, after all - there is no requirement that any of it make any sense.
In Wheaton’s own FAQ, they can’t bring themselves to actually state outright that Muslims and Christians worship different gods!
To quote:
Note: all of what Wheaton states in its FAQ is about the nature of Wheaton’s Christian faith vs. Islam. All of it can be 100% true and yet 100% compatible with the conclusion: ‘yet, despite the acknowledged fundamental differences between the two faiths, we acknowledge that Muslims worship the god of the Jews as revealed in the Torah, and we do as well - although, as we have said, we understand the nature of that god differently from both Jews and Muslims’.
In fact, Wheaton never outright concludes differently. It never takes the next step and says something like ‘in light of our belief in salvation through Christ alone, our god is in effect a different god from that of the Muslims (or Jews, for that matter)’. You have to read that between the lines.
It is a perfect example of a ‘yes or no’ question that goes basically unanswered, indicating uncertainty and discomfort: all the more remarkable in that they wrote it voluntarily. If this issue were ever to go before a court, a cross-examiner would have a field day with them.
The God of the Jews is the God of the Muslims (with their added revelations), but the added revelations of the Muslims means the God of the Muslims is not the God of the Jews. Once you change the previous guy’s God, the “same” argument only works one way.
I think Wheaton would say that eEvangelicals also believe in an undivided and singular nature of God in three expressions:Father, Son and Spirit. 3 in 1, like the lubricant. (No; it doesn’t make sense, and Yes; it’s doublespeak–but hey–it’s theology, remember).
The Qur’an calls out a specific denial of the Trinity (since Mo invented Islam after the Christians invented the Trinity).
The Torah calls out a singular God, which the Evangelicals buy into it. It does not deny the Trinity by name since the Trinity was not even invented yet to deny.
Yada yada blah blah blah
But as for Dr Hawkins, what she’ll have to do when the firing process begins is defend her position on all this, or risk getting fired for not clarifying it. There are plenty of arguments for both sides but Wheaton is not going to extend Evangelical ecumenism to Islamic tenets about God. Period.
Neither Jews nor Muslims see it that way. Nor, may I add, does that make much in the way of sense. Rather, as far as I know, Jews and Muslims acknowledge that the same god is in issue, but disagree on the nature of his prophets - Muslims adding Mohammed (and, for that matter, Jesus) to ‘the list’.
The Torah isn’t, of course, Judaism. Judaism is the modern religion of the Jews, that includes the Torah of course, but also the traditions and interpretations found in the ‘oral Torah’ - most notably, the Talmud - which certainly post-date, in parts, the founding of Christianity: in some cases (the “commentaries”) explicitly so. In all cases, once Jews became aware of Christianity, they needless to say denied the notion of a “son” or the trinity.
Under your theory, the Torah may get off the hook, but Judaism would not.
Interestingly, Judaism has a “built-in” approach to other religions that are not Jewish: the Noahide laws. In Judaism, only Jews need to be Jewish. Non-Jews can be whatever they want, as long as they follow the 'laws of Noah". The reasoning: Noah was universally considered a righteous man, but of course, he was not Jewish - he predates Judaism. Noah was also, naturally, the ancestor of everyone on Earth. Therefore, anyone can be “righteous”, as long as they follow the laws Noah followed (no murdering, no stealing, etc.). The question of whether they are worshipping ‘the same god’ if they follow a different religion isn’t important.
