Sometimes this is combined with a heavy mysterian see main entry section 3 emphasis which suggests that both one-self and three-self Trinity theories are false Volf , 50—9, — Less often, both three- and one-self theories are clearly denied on the basis of divine transcendence Turner Muslim and Jewish critics sometimes object that trinitarianism is simply tritheism. Again, if the doctrine is spun as merely the claim that God is called by three names i.
Of them, the Zohar c. Scholem , The similarities between these and various trinitarian doctrines even led some medieval Jews to make the anachronistic claim that the trinitarian doctrine was based on a misunderstanding of the kabbalistic traditions Lasker , Later, some renaissance and early modern Christians turned this around, attempting to argue from kabbalistic writings to versions of the Trinity and the Incarnation doctrines Antognazza ; Coudert ; Scholem , — Albert Mohler, the President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, strenuously disagrees with the idea that it is appropriate for Christians to pray to "Allah" as they do in some Malaysian churches.
The key condition for Christians' calling God "Allah" is that "Allah" must refer to the same God as is revealed in the Bible. But that is not the case, according to Mohler. He writes:. How then can the use of Allah by Christians lead to anything but confusion Rather than examining what Christians mean when they speak of "God's Son" and what Muslims mean when they contest the claim that "God has a son," as, for instance, Nicholas of Cusa has done in his Cribratio Alkorani , Mohler takes Christian and Muslim claims in their surface sense and concludes that Muslims and Christians worship two different gods.
If so, then it would be confusing to designate them with the same name. So should Christians reject "Allah" as a term for God? They should not. For the most part, we don't translate proper names; "Obama" is "Obama" transliterated in all languages.
We translate descriptive terms; "the president" is "predsjednik" in Croatian. Even more important than the meaning and the character of the word "Allah" is the millennia-long practice of Christians : "Arabic Christians and Arabic-speaking Jews since long before the time of Muhammad have used the name 'Allah' to refer to God The Copts are a good example, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world going back to the first century.
Living as they do in Egypt and speaking Arabic, they use "Allah" for God. Witness, for instance, what happens in a Coptic ceremony after a cross has been tattooed onto a wrist of an infant child as a sign of religious and ethnic identification in a predominantly Muslim and Arab society.
The whole assembled congregation shouts "Allah! They are unmistakably affirming the Christian faith, and they are doing so by exclaiming the same word for God as their Muslim compatriots do. The whole heated discussion about the proper designation for God is a bit futile. Those who insist that Christians and Muslims must use different designations for God generally think that the two groups worship different deities.
But a different word for God, obviously, does not mean that God is different. You can use different words to refer to the same thing. Inversely, the mere fact that Muslims and Christians use the same word for God does not mean that their God is the same.
With the distinction between the "designation" or term and the "referent" or object in mind, the crucial question is not whether Christians and Muslims should or should not use the same word for God.
Rather, it is whether Christians and Muslims refer to the same "object" when they speak of "God" or "Allah" or whatever other term for God they legitimately use. Whatever the designation, is the referent the same? Of course, some people believe that both Christians and Muslims - indeed, all religious people - worship nothing more than human projections. Ludwig Feuerbach famously advocated this position with great force in The Essence of Christianity. In the interests of brevity, I will simply assume that Feuerbach is mistaken, and that Christians worship the One God, Creator of all that is seen and unseen.
I think that Muslims have that same object in mind when they worship God. But can that be shown? We also find that the Bible portrays Yahweh in contrast to Allah. For example, Allah is considered to be too holy to have personal relationships with man, but Yahweh is often described as a loving God interested in our personal struggles. Yahweh is also depicted as unchanging and One who assures the salvation of the faithful. Finally, because there is unity in the Trinity with the one God also being three persons, God can be described as the Father of Jesus.
Some scholars want to emphasize the similarities between Yahweh and Allah, and point to a common belief in a monotheistic God who is Creator of all things, omnipotent and merciful. Both religions also claim that God has sent prophets to reveal His will and produce scriptures to guide our lives. However, Allah and Yahweh cannot refer to the same person for the following reasons. First of all, their attributes are different. Also, since his power is more important than his other attributes, there is an unequal emphasis on power over his other attributes.
In the end, a follower cannot know God or even be sure of the consistency of his attributes. On the other hand, because Yahweh is by nature a triune unity his attributes stem from his nature. So let's take up the central claims of the Qur'anic passages above and see how each relates to what Christianity's creeds and great teachers mean when they speak about the trinitarian nature of God. Response: The issue here is the meaning of the word begotten, not the substance of our understanding of God.
Christians do not think of "begetting," when applied to God, as a physical act between male and female divinity. Speaking for the whole of the Christian tradition, Gregory of Nyssa, one of the most prominent of the Eastern church fathers, wrote: "The divine is neither male nor female for how could such a thing be contemplated in divinity?
Begetting or eternal generation, as the technical term goes, is a metaphor used to express the idea that the Word, which was from eternity with God, is neither a creature nor some sort of lesser divinity, but is the very uncreated God. The exact point of using the term begotten is to distinguish the generation of the Son from an act of creation—"begotten, not made," as the Nicene Creed affirms—to insist that the eternal Word or Son is not a being next to God but is of one essence with God.
Response: Exactly right. When Christians speak of "Father, Son and Holy Spirit," writes Archbishop Williams, summarizing traditional Christian convictions, they "do not mean one God with two beings alongside him. Response: Again, exactly right. When Christians speak of the three in God, they do not mean "three gods of limited power," writes the archbishop. The Athanasian Creed puts the same point this way: the divine essence is "not divided.
Response: Christians generally do not say that God was Christ; I know of no significant classical theologian who makes that claim. The two claims—that God was Christ, and Christ was God—seem similar but are in fact very different. Christians believe that Christ was fully human and therefore in need of food and shelter, as well as fully divine and therefore of one undivided essence with God.
Response: Christians agree that anyone who worships a human being does so in denigration of God; that person is an idolater. Christians reject worship of Christ or anyone else in place of God.
In worshiping Christ, whom they consider to be fully divine, they are worshiping the one and undivided divine essence. From the Christian perspective, affirming the existence of multiple self-subsisting divine essences is polytheism—and "pure unbelief.
A basic rule for Christians as they speak about God is this: "Never divide divine essence. A positive way to make the same point would be to say that Christians affirm "numerical identity of the divine essence. A Muslim critic might well cry out, "False victory! The agreement you have sketched about God's unity is nothing but mere words. Just listen to the way you talk about how God acts in the world, and the agreement will disappear like dense fog under the sun's warm rays.
If you claim that the 'Son' was incarnate but the 'Father' was not, have you not in fact divided the Trinity? You are simultaneously saying two contradictory things, namely, that the divine essence is undivided and that the divine persons are distinct. At worst, you are disingenuous: to soothe your guilty monotheistic conscience or maybe even to mislead Muslims and Jews , you put up a good front by insisting that God's essence cannot be divided.
But behind the scenes, you actually believe in three gods. Come clean! Either give up on God's unity or reject the Trinity. You can't have it both ways. Clearly, it is one thing to reject division of the divine essence and another thing to actually avoid dividing it just as it is one thing to condemn sin and another thing not to commit it. So how do Christians keep the divine essence undivided? In addition to stating clearly that there is only one numerically identical divine essence, they note that the persons are tied and intertwined together in a most intimate manner, more intimate than any relation between creatures could ever be.
There are two related ways to think about this intimate connection between the divine three who are indivisibly one.
First, when God acts "toward the outside"—creating, redeeming, and bringing the world to completion—God's acts are undivided, inseparable. Every act of one person of the Trinity is always caused by all three. If this were not the case, then, as Augustine put it, "the Father [would do] some things, the Son others and the Holy Spirit yet others.
It would verge on polytheism. The second way the divine persons are tied together is their mutual indwelling or, in technical terminology, perichoresis.
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