I had previously written about the question of whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Recently I picked up on the same type of question through for different reasons, asking whether Evangelicals and Roman Catholics believe in the same God. Well when I started to think about that question, I was already thinking that the punchline might be the question I’ve asked in the title here. It is important then to be clear about what I am and not intending to ask and answer. I am not asking whether you and I on a personal level believe in the same God, or different branches of Christianity. What I want to think about is whether I, you, we believe in the same God as the God revealed in Scripture.
To start to answer that question, it might be helpful to have a look at an article by my friend, Steve Kneale, where he responds to my article on Catholics and Evangelicals. Steve argues that we believe in the same God but a different Gospel. It’s worth picking up on a few things that he says. First, Steve expresses surprise at my statement that “ Nor do we think of Muslims as positing an alternative divine being in the way that we may say that Hindus do.” Steve’s argument is that yes, because Muslims do not recognise Jesus as divine, they do believe in a different entity. The point is that there are in effect two ways of ending up with a different God. I distinguished Islam from Hinduism because Hinduism comes from a completely different starting point, a different worldview, it has created its God/gods from scratch. This is different from a situation where people are seeking to believe in/worship the same God because the origins are the same. Islam has its roots in the same place and in fact when you look closely at its teaching, you see a close affinity with both Arian and Gnostic traditions.
Consider how Solomon was enticed to worship other gods through his polygamy and the Moabites seduced Israel into idolatry in the wilderness.[1] Compare those examples with what happens with Aaron makes the golden calf in Exodus 32 there seem to be strong indications there that what is happening is that Aaron, is seeking to provide a means for the people to worship Yahweh rather than offering them a foreign alternative. However, what happens is that he offers them a different god, that isn’t the one true God and draws the people into idolatry. He attempts to make an image of God and so offers a distorted image not least because to do so he must draw on the false religious beliefs of others. It’s worth observing similarly the ways in which Arianism, Gnosticism, Islam and Roman Catholicism have drawn on other worldviews in order to develop their image of God.
By the way, I think it is also helpful to see things not so much in binary terms as on a continuum. Roman Catholicism, Islam, liberal Christianity, the Jehovah’s Witnesses do not sll land in the same place to each other and some views will seem closer to what we believe God’s Word says about himself.
I’m not convinced by Steve’s example of someone knowing his father differently to him but still knowing him. Let’s leave aside the question about whether or not they want to be part of Steve’s family and belong to a different family because I think that confuses things a little. Surely, tin that case, if we are saying that a Roman Catholic is from a different family, then they do have a different father!
However, think a little bit more about what happens when we think we know someone but we do not. The reality is that yes, we can have misconceptions about others or may not fully know them. Getting to know them properly will change how we relate to them and they to us. Now, it is worth remembering at this stage that you and I are complex beings, God is simple meaning that God’s attributes are all essential to him. You cannot cut a bit of God off and still have God. Furthermore, whilst in many cases, we would say that we do know the person, we just need to get to know them better, there are also plenty of cases where people admit that they got it completely wrong. They will even say that someone is a completely different person to the person they thought they were. Sadly, this can have pastoral consequences when people have either created a fantasy or nightmare image of someone else.
Notice the close tie up between who we believe someone to be and how we relate to them. This is why there is a close connection between what we believe about God and what we believe the Gospel is. In fact, we might say that there is one God and one Gospel or “there is one Lord, oen faith, one baptism”. That’s how closely the two relate. So, it’s not just that I have a different Gospel which might cause me to misunderstand things about God, it is that the different Gospel itself arises out of that distorted image of who God is and what God is like.
This helps us to understand why and how we do theological triage. Why do we say that some things are of first and central importance and other things are second order, important but not essential. Sometimes we talk about first order things being “Gospel issues” but that could cause confusion if we think too narrowly. Why do we make the Trinity itself of first importance? Is it a Gospel issue? Well I think that we want to say yes because of how our knowledge of God ties into the means by which we come to know and trust him.
It’s important because I think the risk is that if we simply say “same God, different Gospel” then we can assume that we have just got to explain salvation by grace and faith alone better to people and then all will be well. However, there are plenty of people who don’t really care much for getting the Gospel right because they don’t really want to be right with the God they believe in.
Now there is an element of rhetoric in what I’m saying here and I hope you will see the underpinning nuance too but the implications then is that we can be on paper, fully orthodox evangelicals but can actually have ended up with a God who is distorted, and the risk is that we can communicate this god to others. The risk is that this Gods becomes so distorted both in our own beliefs and in our gospel communication that people like legitimately ask us if we do believe in the same God.
If the God we communicate to others seems to be weak and limited, capricious and vindictive, either lacking in his goodness or his greatness then we may have offered them a different God. I don’t want to be there on judgement day and hear someone I know saying to God “You are nothing like what I expected.”
[1] Numbers 25.
Faithroots 