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Dr. Tomas Bogardus and his student Mallorie Urban have a paper forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy entitled “How to Tell Whether Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God.” In this episode I discuss this fascinating and I think helpful paper with both authors.
Terms and names can shift reference over time, from one reality to another, or from one reality to nothing at all! As is well known, before the life of Muhammad, Arabic-speaking Christians called God Allah, the grammatical equivalent of the Greek ho theos (“God,” literally, “the god”) in the New Testament. But should a Christian say that there has been a reference shift in terms like “God” and “Allah,” so that when Muslims nowadays use them they don’t refer to God? And turning the question around, should a Muslim think that Christians have so saddled the word “God” with misinformation that they are no longer referring to the one who is (in their view) the God of Abraham, Moses, and Muhammad?
Dr. Bogardus and Ms. Urban help us to think about reference shifting using the real-life, non-theological cases of “St. Nicholas” and “Madagascar,” using insights from the work of Gareth Evans (1946-80). They give us a sort of recipe for answering this question, a method which goes beyond just saying the answer which your own social group demands of you.
Is it a correct recipe? If you tried it, what result did you get?
Links for this episode:
- Tomas Bogardus’s home page
- Francis Beckwith
- Michael C. Rea
- Tuggy – the “same god” controversy and Christian commitment – Part 1
- Gareth Evans
- “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”
- Olsen, “The Real St. Nicholas”
- The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
- Meghan Sullivan, “Semantics for Blasphemy”
- podcast 120 – Do Christians and Muslims worship the same god? Part 1
- This week’s thinking music is “The Ombak” by Little Glass Men.
Just got to listen to this today. It creates a type of dilemma that’s for sure… but I have a hard time following all the different lines of thought. It really seems as if this question could be true/false at the same time in a different manner of understanding.
Taking my own personal beliefs and change of mind. I was a trinitarian. Whilst praying for the truth about God and studying whether or not God was really three-in-one, was I being heard? In my mind of course I thought so, but in reality was I praying to a triune god I had made up in my mind and wanted to know the real God? Or was I praying to the real God and eventually it became clear enough that the real God of the Bible wasn’t three-in-one through prayer and study?
Taking another line of thought from debate. In my own debate it’s admitted that a unitarian God(Father alone) is *not* the same God as a triune God(Father, Son, Spirit). By this definition would we be speaking of the same God…yes and no, right? Yes, because we’re both arguing that this “God” being debated about is the one and only God of the Bible. But no, since we’re saying they’re not the one and the same God?
So does a Muslim worship the same God as even a unitarian Christian? I would still answer in the negative at this point. I think the linguistics is too far off that the Muslim God is reserved for the subject of referring to a fantasy much the same way that Saint Nicolas is now Santa Claus. I think trinitarians are the same way if I’m fully open and honest about the subject. Thanks for the thoughts though… I’ll definitely look forward to hearing more of their thoughts in the next podcast.
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