With God, Bush Is on the Right Side

During his trip to Britain last month, President Bush scandalized some of his evangelical fans by innocently asserting that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.

Evangelical theologian Richard Land, speaking for the scandalized, rebuked the president for what Land calls playing “theologian in chief.” In Land’s view, “when President Bush concludes that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, he is simply mistaken.”

In my view, Bush is, at least on this point, a better theologian than his critics.

Though Land neither confirms nor denies that Jews and Christians worship the same God, surely he would concede that the first Christians – Jews all – did not understand Christian discipleship to entail switching to a new God. But what of the first Muslims? If they too understood themselves to be worshiping the god of the Jews, then were they not necessarily worshiping the god of the Christians as well?

The Koran identifies Allah as none other than the God to whom Abraham offered “submission” (or “islam”) in the episode Jews and Christians know so well from Genesis 22, the story of the binding of Isaac.

As the paradigmatic Muslim, or “submitter,” Abraham then made the original paradigmatic pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims believe, accompanied by the very son, Ishmael, whom Allah had rescued so dramatically.

Jews and Christians have always believed that Muhammad got this story wrong. It was Isaac, not Ishmael, who was bound, they believe, and Abraham made no such pilgrimage to Mecca. But have Jews and Christians also believed, historically, that Muhammad had the divine protagonist wrong as well – to the point that he was referring to another deity altogether?

This, it seems, is Land’s assumption when he writes: “There is only one true God and his name is Jehovah, not Allah.”

Centuries of Jewish and Christian thinkers, however, have assumed just the opposite: that Jews, Christians and Muslims have always assumed their differences to be about the character rather than the identity of God.

In late medieval Spain, for instance, where the three religions mingled freely and the best scholars spoke Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, a number of famous theological debates took place in which all participants transparently assumed that all other participants were speaking of – and disagreeing about – the same divine subject.

Perhaps the most strenuous of all such medieval wrestling matches was the silent, private bout between Thomas Aquinas and Abul Walid Mohammed ibn Rushd, the earlier Muslim philosopher whom the West knows as Averroes. Aquinas wrote his immense “Summa Contra Gentiles” in good part to refute Rushd, but he never saw fit to take what would have been the terribly convenient “mistaken identity” shortcut. He never claimed (in the manner of Richard Land) that whatever his Muslim forebear had said about God was irrelevant because the man was simply speaking of another deity, a strange god, a holy somebody else.

Muslim assumptions on the same point are, if anything, even more formally enshrined in tradition than Jewish and Christian assumptions.

Muslims battled those who worshipped false gods, beginning with the Arab polytheists of Mecca and Medina, but they officially tolerated Jews and Christians because they understood the latter to be worshiping the one true God, or, in Arabic, Allah. Regrettably, or so Muslims believed, Jews and Christians had adulterated the primeval, pure “islam” of Abraham with an assortment of pagan errors, but that all the same these “peoples of the book” were not worshiping a false god.

I do not mean to deny that theological differences exist among Jews, Christians and Muslims, or that these many differences matter. Yet there remains an immense common holding as well. One need only view the three Abrahamic religions from Benares or Kyoto to realize this. All three teach that God is the creator and God will someday end the world he created. All three say that God will show himself as a judge on the last day, and that the criterion for his judgment will be not worldly greatness but moral integrity. The list of commonalities can be extended just as easily as the list of differences.

As for the political context of Bush’s London remark, it has to matter to all Americans that, thanks in part to evangelical aggressiveness, much of the Muslim world believes that the U.S. war on terror is a war on Islam or, worse, an American-led Christian war on Islam.

The president – in his proper capacity as political rather than theological leader – ought to miss no opportunity to repudiate this view. His recent remark puts him squarely in the Christian mainstream and should be welcomed as a small step in the right direction.