<div dir="ltr"><span title="2012-03-05">March 5, 2012</span>
<h1>Do Catholics and Muslims Worship the Same God?</h1>
<span><a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/author/robert-spencer" target="_blank">Robert Spencer</a><br><a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/do-catholics-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god">http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/do-catholics-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god</a></span> <img src="http://3m7ajlsrzj92lfd1hu16hu7vc.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/pope_iman.jpg" alt="pope_iman" height="255" width="399"> <div>
<p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>It certainly seems <u>as if </u>we worship the same God. </b></span>After all, we call
God by the same name. Arabic-speaking Christians, including Eastern
Catholics such as Maronites and Melkites, use the word “Allah” for the
God of the Bible.</p>
<p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>But are they the same God?</b></span></p>
<p>The question is not answered by simple linguistic identity, as
evidenced by <span style="background-color:rgb(208,224,227)"><b>St. Paul’s complaint to the Corinthians: “For if some one
comes and preaches another Jesus than the one we preached, or if you
receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a
different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily
enough”</b></span> (2 Corinthians 11:4). The “other Jesus” that was being preached
among the Corinthians was not a different person of the same name, but a
view of Jesus of Nazareth that was so radically different from Paul’s
that he termed it “another Jesus” altogether.</p>
<p>In the same way, it is possible that <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>the Qur’an and Islamic tradition
present a picture of God so radically different from that of the Bible
and Catholic tradition</b></span> that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to
maintain the proposition that they are the same Being in both
traditions, apart from some minor creedal differences.</p>
<p>But wait a minute. Don’t Catholics <i>have</i> to believe that
Christians and Muslims worship the same God, because the Second Vatican
Council says so? The Dogmatic Constitution on <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>the Church tells us that
the “plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator.
In the first place amongst these there are the Mohammedans, who,
professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and
merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.</b></span>” (<i>Lumen Gentium</i> 16)</p>
<p>It is almost more important to clarify <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>what this text<u> does <i>not</i>
say</u></b></span><u> </u>than what it does. The first statement, that “the plan of salvation
also includes” Muslims, has led some – mostly critics of the Church –
to assert that the Council Fathers are saying that Muslims are saved,
and thus need not be preached the Gospel, as they’ve already got just as
much of a claim on Heaven as do Christians.</p>
<p>This is obviously false. This statement on Muslims comes as part of a
larger passage that begins by speaking of “those who have not yet
received the Gospel” and concludes by reaffirming<b><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"> “the command of the
Lord, ‘Preach the Gospel to every creature.’</span></b>” It speaks of the
possibility of salvation for those who “through no fault of their own do
not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and
moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to
them through the dictates of conscience.”</p>
<p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>Clearly, then, Muslims figure in the “plan of salvation” <u>not in the
sense that they are saved as Muslims</u>,</b></span> that is, by means of Islamic
observance, but insofar as they strive to be attentive to and to obey
the authentic voice of the Creator whom they acknowledge and who speaks
to them through the dictates of their conscience.</p>
<p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>This suggests that a Muslim who refrains from suicide bombing because
he understands that it is cold-blooded murder has a better chance to be
saved, and is more clearly attuned to the promptings of the Creator
within whose plan of salvation </b></span>he finds himself, <span style="background-color:rgb(234,209,220)"><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>than </b></span><b>does a Muslim who
blows himself up in a crowd of infidels because the Qur’an promises a
place in Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111).</b></span></p>
<p>The Conciliar statement also wisely adds the caveat, all too often ignored by the Church’s critics, that “Mohammedans” (<i>Musulmanos</i>)
are “professing” to hold the faith of Abraham. Whether or not they
actually hold it is arguable, but the Vatican Council is only noting
that they claim for their faith that it is that of Abraham, without
discussing whether or not Islam actually is an authentically Abrahamic
faith.</p>
<p>Likewise<b> </b>widely misinterpreted, or at least given a weight that it
was clearly never meant to bear, is the subsequent affirmation that
Muslims “along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last
day will judge mankind.” Many see in this also an assertion that the
Gospel need not be preached to Muslims, or that they are already saved,
for they adore the one and merciful God. Many Catholics, including
writers of some prominence, have asserted that Vatican II, and the <i>Catechism of the Catholic Church</i>
that quotes it, teach that Catholics and Muslims worship the same God,
and then proceed as if this establishes more than it actually does, or
as if it were obvious that the Council was thus forbidding a critical
stance toward Islam or concern about Islamic supremacist advances in
Europe and the U.S.</p>
<p>In this vein the great Catholic writer and apologist Peter Kreeft
writes disapprovingly that “many Christians, both Protestant and
Catholic, do not believe what the Church says about Islam (for example,
in Vatican II and the new <i>Catechism</i>): that Allah is not another
God, that we worship the same God.” He leaves unexplained, however,
what he thinks that means exactly, or what responsibilities or courses
of action it sets out for Catholics.</p>
<p>The Council document is actually saying perhaps less than Kreeft and
others of like mind would wish it to be saying. In the first place it is
clearly affirming that <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>Muslims, like Christians, are monotheists</b></span>, which
is a rather commonplace observation that has been noted numerous times
over the fourteen centuries of Islam’s existence. <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>As far back as 1076,
Pope St. Gregory VII wrote to Anzir, the king of Mauritania, that “we
believe and confess one God, although in different ways</b></span>.”</p>
<p>What it is asserting beyond that bare fact, if anything, can best be
ascertained by considering the passage in light of those “different
ways” to which Pope Gregory alluded. It is noteworthy that Pope Gregory
doesn’t say that the one God that he and King Anzir both worship is the
same God. All<span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b> he says is that both he and Anzir worship one God; in
other words, they’re both monotheists.</b></span> And the Second Vatican Council is
not actually making a definitive statement on that issue. It is saying
that both Catholics and Muslims adore the one and merciful God, and
while that clearly does indicate a certain commonality, there can be no
doubt about one thing it certainly<span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b> doesn’t mean: that Muslims and
Catholics adore the same God </b></span>in every particular, <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>for </b><b>Catholics do not
believe that Muhammad was a prophet or the Qur’an is God’s Word, and
Muslims do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God or the Savior of the
world, or that God is Triune</b></span>.</p>
<p>The same may be said of Jews, of course: they, along with Muslims,
reject the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the divinity of Christ, and yet
clearly<span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b> Catholics and Jews worship the same God. This, however, is
because Christianity began as a form of Judaism and is in a certain
sense an extension of it, affirming faith in the same Old Testament
Scriptures, the same prophets, and many points of belief.</b></span></p>
<p>These things cannot be said about Islam, which considers itself to be
less an extension of Christianity than a rejection and correction of
it, such that Muslims even reject the Old and New Testament Scriptures
as corruptions.</p>
<p>In declaring that both Muslims and Catholics adore the one and
merciful God, the Council obviously did not mean that Muslims and
Catholics regard that God in exactly the same way, or that the
differences were insignificant. The Council is silent on the question of
whether or not the Muslims’ adoration is blind or informed. So <b>what,
then, is the Council a</b>ctually saying?</p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>
</b></span><p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>Vatican II was a large-scale attempt to restore relationships that
had been broken for centuries and build new bridges of trust </b></span>where
groups had been divided from the Church by centuries of mistrust,
suspicion and outright conflict. Consequently it emphasized common
ground rather than differences, unlike every ecumenical council that
preceded it. No case, however, can be made that its statement about the
shared adoration of the one and merciful God in any way mitigated the
Church’s truth claim or sense of its own responsibility to preach the
Gospel of Jesus Christ, any more than shared monotheism removes that
responsibility in regard to Protestants or anyone else, for that
responsibility is reiterated in the same passage.</p>
<p>It is not even certain that the Council is saying that Muslims and Catholics adore the <i>same </i>“one
and merciful God.” Muslims certainly believe that their one and
merciful God is the same One whom Christians (and Jews) worship, for the
Qur’an tells them so (29:46). And whether they know it or not, the only
God actually available to receive their adoration and hear their
prayers is the Christian one. However, the differences in how Muslims
and Catholics conceive of the one and merciful God lead to the
possibility that while Muslims believe that they are worshiping the same
God that Catholic worship, the teachings of Islam itself, despite <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>the
Qur’an</b></span>’s insistence that Muslims worship the same God as do Christians
and Jews, actually<span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b> paints a picture of a God who is substantially
different from the God of the Bible and the Catholic Faith.</b></span></p>
<p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>It is noteworthy</b></span> in this connection <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>that the Council speaks of “Muslims” (<i>Musulmanos</i>),
not “Islam,” adoring with Catholics the one and merciful God.</b></span> <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)">It is a
manifest fact that Muslim people believe that their God and the
Christians’ God is the same. It is by no means as clear that the
teachings of Islam itself about God offer a picture of the same Being
who is delineated in orthodox Catholic theology.</span> Although
Arabic-speaking Christians generally use the word “Allah” for the God of
the Bible – the same Arabic word used for the God of the Qur’an – this
<span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>identity of name does not require that the two Beings referred to in
each book are one and the same. It may be so, but it is not established
on the basis of the Qur’an’s declaration, or of the identity in
nomenclature</b></span>.</p>
<p>In any case, this short passage from <i>Lumen Gentium</i> is
burdened down by a weight of assumptions. When Kreeft says that “many
Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, do not believe what the Church
says about Islam (for example, in Vatican II and the new <i>Catechism</i>):
that Allah is not another God, that we worship the same God,” he
apparently assumes that to affirm that Muslims and Christians worship
the same God establishes an important kinship between the two groups,
and may even indicate that Islam in itself is a fundamentally good
thing, such that Catholics should encourage Islamic faith and Muslim
piety. Kreeft, in fact, espoused such a view in a debate with me.</p>
<p>These assumptions, however, do not proceed as a matter of necessity
or inevitability from the Conciliar text. It would do no outrage to that
text if t<span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>he differences between the Islamic and Catholic views of the
one and merciful God, and between Islam and Catholicism in general, were
such that Catholics would not wish to encourage Muslim faith or fervor.</b></span>
One may therefore take a jaundiced view of the prospects for
Catholic/Muslim cooperation and dialogue without dissenting from the
Council’s teaching.</p>
<p>At the same time, even if the Council Fathers did mean to affirm that
Catholics and Muslims worship the same God, this would have little
significance <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>for the contemporary ecclesiastical or political situation,
in which Muslims are oppressing and killing Christian believers in
several countries without regard for the Qur’an’s insistence that “our
Allah and your Allah is one.</b></span>” And as for the assumption that the Council
meant to speak of a special kinship between Catholics and Muslims,
<span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Catholics have a moral obligation to be charitable to all people,
regardless of whether or not they believe in the same God we do. Genuine
charity includes a concern for justice.</span></p>
<p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>The second Vatican II reference to Islam</b></span> comes in the Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, <i>Nostra Aetate</i>:</p>
<blockquote><p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They
adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-
powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,</b></span> who has spoken to men; they
take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees,
just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking
itself, submitted to God. <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God,
they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother;
at times they even call on her with devotion</b></span>. In addition, they await
the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who
have been raised up from the dead. Finally, <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>they value the moral life
and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.</b></span></p>
<p>Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities
have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all
to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to
preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind
social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.</p></blockquote>
<p>While this is a bit more descriptive about Muslim belief than was <i>Lumen Gentium</i>,
as it includes the Islamic classification of Jesus as a non-divine
prophet and Islam’s respect for the Virgin Mary, it adds nothing in
terms of substance to the Dogmatic Constitution’s statements about
Muslims.<span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b> Here again we see that the Muslim linkage of Islam to Abraham
is presented not as fact, but as something Muslims affirm, or “take
pleasure” in affirming. Here again we see that they adore the one,
merciful God; in other words, that they’re monotheists.</b></span></p>
<p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>That is all that Vatican II is really saying about Muslims: they’re
monotheists, they say they belong to the religion of Abraham, and they
revere Jesus, but not as the Son of God, and His Blessed Mother.</b></span></p>
<p>The tone is very different, but not much in terms of substance is
added in earlier Church statements on Muslims and Islam. And <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)">as Pope
Benedict XVI has reminded us, Vatican II is not a super-council that
supersedes all previous Church teaching; rather, its teachings must be
understood in light of tradition. When it comes to Islam, the consistent
focus in earlier statements about Islam is generally not on what
Muslims believe, but on Islam as a heresy, and on the hostility of
Muslims to Christians and Christianity. In that vein, Pope Benedict XIV
in 1754 reaffirmed an earlier prohibition on Albanian Catholics giving
their children “Turkish or Mohammedan names” in baptism by pointing out
that not even Protestants or Orthodox were stooping so low: “none of the
schismatics and heretics has been rash enough to take a Mohammedan
name, and unless your justice abounds more than theirs, you shall not
enter the kingdom of God.”</span></p>
<p>Pope Callixtus III, in a somewhat similar spirit, in 1455 vowed to
“exalt the true Faith, and to extirpate the diabolical sect of the
reprobate and faithless Mahomet in the East.” <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>Neither this statement nor
that of <i>Lumen Gentium</i> rise to the level of a dogmatic
definition, but is it possible for Islam to be a “diabolical sect” that
at the same time adores the “one and merciful God”? </b></span>Certainly, for it is
always possible that their adoration of the one and merciful God may be
wrongly directed, marred by wrong emphases and outright falsehoods.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>many Catholics would argue</b></span> that the statements of
Benedict XIV and Callixtus III (and others like them from other popes)
reflect a very different age from our own, and that Vatican II’s
statements reflect a more mature spirit, as well as the charity toward
others that Christians should properly exhibit. And that may well be so,
although it must be noted that even though they are only fifty years
old, <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>the statements of Vatican II on Islam reflect the outlook of a
vanished age no less than do those of the earlier popes. For in the
1960s, secularism and Westernization were very much the order of the day
in many areas of the Islamic world.</b> It was, for example, unusual in
Cairo in the 1960s to see a woman wearing a hijab, an Islamic headscarf
mandated by Muhammad’s command</span> that a woman when appearing in public
should cover everything except her face and hands. <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)">Now, on the other
hand, one may walk down the streets of the same city and be surprised to
see a woman who is <i>not</i> so attired.</span></p>
<p>This change has not been solely external. The hijabs in Cairo are but
one visible sign of <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>a revolution that has swept the Islamic world, or
more properly, a revival. Islamic values have been revived, including
</b><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">not only rigor in dress codes but </span><b>also a hostility toward Western ideas
and principles.</b></span> The “Arab Spring” uprisings have led to a reassertion of
the political aspects of Islam, as opposed to Western political models,
all across the Middle East. Western ideas of democracy and pluralism
that were fashionable in elite circles all over the Islamic world in the
first half of the twentieth century have fallen into disrepute.</p>
<p>One consequence of all this is that <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>the Islamic world that the
Fathers of Vatican II had in mind is rapidly disappearing. </b></span>The words of
Vatican II on Muslims must be accorded the respect that all Church
teaching merits, and obeyed to the degree that obedience is owed to all
magisterial statements. These statements must be evaluated, however,
within the context of their times. The documents of Vatican II are no
less a product of their age than the statements of Benedict XIV and
Callixtus III are a product of theirs. Just as the age of crusading
knights has vanished, so also the age of a dominant secular West
striding confidently into what it terms the “modern” age is rapidly
vanishing. <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>This is not to devalue or denigrate the Council in any way,
but simply to see it as what it is, no more, no less: an enunciation of
certain eternal truths, to be sure, but within the context of a number
of unexamined and yet decisively influential core beliefs and
assumptions about the nature of the world and of mankind.</b></span></p>
<p>Ultimately, while it may always be the Christian’s responsibility to
reach out with respect and esteem to Muslims, the hostility that the
Islamic world had always displayed toward Christendom was never less in
evidence than it was in the 1960s, and so a statement of friendship was
never more appropriate, either before or since. That situation does not
prevail today, a fact that has a great many implications for the
prospects for dialogue as well: <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>Western-minded Muslims who have a
favorable attitude toward the Catholic Church no longer have nearly the
influence among their coreligionists that they once had, at least in the
Islamic world.</b></span></p>
<p><span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>That is not to say, however, that we have returned to the world of
Benedict XIV and Callixtus III, when Catholics understood that
Mohammedanism, as it was then popularly styled (to the indignation of
Muslims themselves) was a heresy, steeped in falsehood and perhaps even
diabolical, and dedicated to the destruction of the Church and the
conversion or subjugation of Christians.</b></span> We are centuries away, and
separated by chasms of cultural assumptions, from the world in which it
was even possible to think of one’s faith as having enemies and needing
to be defended. Catholics of the modern age have long assumed that that
world was gone forever, and there is some reason to believe that it is
indeed.</p>
<p>But <span style="background-color:rgb(182,215,168)"><b>with Muslim persecution of Christians escalating worldwide, there
is also considerable evidence that that rough old world is returning,
and may never have been as far away as it seemed to be.</b></span></p>
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<span>Tagged as</span>
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<img alt="" src="http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/a013af5a79fbed9134c65c21a5c1e1f0?s=75&d=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crisismagazine.com%2Fwp-content%2Fthemes%2Fthesis_18%2Fcustom%2Fimages%2Fcrisis-avatar.jpg&r=g" height="75" width="75"><h4>By <a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/author/robert-spencer" title="Posts by Robert Spencer" rel="author" target="_blank">Robert Spencer</a></h4>
<p>Robert Spencer is the author of several critically acclaimed books about Islam, including the New York Times bestsellers <i>The Truth about Muhammad</i> and <i>The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)</i>. He is a columnist for <i>FrontPage Magazine</i> and the director of Jihad Watch.</p></div>