Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? Many people are asking this question. It is a question which has more than one answer.
Most Muslims will say ‘Yes, Christians and Muslims worship the same God’. In Islam it is an article of faith that the God of Islam is the God of the Bible. According to the Qur’an, Jesus was a Muslim prophet who taught Islam and worshipped Allah. So any follower of Jesus must, by definition, be a follower of the God of the Qur’an.
In the practice of Islamic proselytism (da’wah), it is commonly emphasized that the God of the Bible and the God of Islam are one and the same. This can be a first step in leading a Christian to convert to Islam.
What about the Trinity? This is rejected in Islam. The Qur’an regards Jesus as a man, created like any other, and calls it blasphemy to afford divine status to him or to call him the Son of God. For some Christians, this is reason enough to say that the God of Islam and the God of Christianity are not the same, since Muslims reject the Trinity, and Christians worship the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as the true God.
Yet, from the Muslim perspective, the claim is not that Christians worship a different God, but that they misrepresent him. An analogy is sometimes made with the Jews, who worship the God of the Bible, but without Trinitarian beliefs. However, this analogy can be misleading. Christians and Jews ground their view of God in the shared sacred history of the Old Testament.
In contrast, the Qur’an considers the Biblical scriptures as corrupted and unreliable. In this sense, Islam does not accept the Bible and what it says about God’s identity and history.
This means that the question needs to be asked: Do the God of the Bible and God of the Qur’an have the same personality or nature? The answer is clearly ‘no’ or ‘only superficially’.
One crucial difference is a capacity for divine presence. The God of the Bible makes himself present in specific places and times, by his Spirit and through Jesus. In Exodus the Lord God went before Israel in a pillar of cloud and fire. Later his glory dwelled above the ark in the tabernacle. Christians believe they are to be sanctified as ‘temples’ of God’s indwelling Holy Spirit. Such understandings cannot be found in the Qur’an, which regards God as being everywhere, yet nowhere in particular.
Another difference is God’s attitude to transgressors. The Qur’an describes a God who hates sinners and loves those who submit to him. The concept that ‘while we were still sinners’ God loved us, is alien to Islam’s message.
On the other hand, the Lord God of Israel is a God who remains true to a disobedient people - he promises even to the ‘thousandth generation’. The story of Hosea marrying a prostitute as an allegory of God’s faithfulness to Israel is inconsistent with the Qur’an’s understanding of God.
A further difference is the Biblical perspective that human beings are made in the image of God. This belief grounds the Christian doctrine of the imitation of God. People should love their enemies, the Bible says, because in doing so they imitate God and become his children, and more like him (Matthew 5:44). This restores the image of God in them. Christians hope to become more and more like Christ, that is, like God.
However, in Islam God has no partners or associates, so the concept of imitating God is alien and would even be regarded as offensive and blasphemous.
Generally speaking, Muslims who become Christians do not consider themselves to have exchanged gods, but rather to have revised their understanding of their Creator.
For this reason, it can be helpful for Christian evangelists to appeal to and build upon some of the understandings of God and Jesus found in the Qur’an, however limited.
No doubt Malaysia has banned Christians from calling God ‘Allah’ in order to stifle evangelism of this kind.
On the other hand, a clear grasp of the differences between God in the Bible and the Qur’an can help Christians to be more secure in their faith. In their vision of God, Christianity and Islam are certainly not the same.
