Christ the Great Metaphysician

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

The Virgin by Viktor Vasnetsov

“Orthodoxy is not a philosophy… It is not a theory, it is not created in a theological institute, it is not a dictated doctrine, it is our experience of God.”

— Father Roman Braga

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Last week, I re-read a book that played a rather large role in my conversion to Christianity. It’s called A Chosen Faith. It was written by two well-known Unitarian Universalist ministers, John Buehrens and Forrest Church. What’s fascinating about this book is that it expands upon the popular, “liberal” view of Christianity. I think that popular view could be summed up like this:

Jesus was a great ethical teacher, an anti-establishment radical who spoke of the need for peace, freedom, and solidarity. Unfortunately, after His death, His more simple-minded followers began to worship Him as a god. Quickly, a cult emerged around the this Jesus. Within a few centuries, this cult that was eventually cooped by the Roman Empire. The same tyrants who put Jesus to death then used his memory to reify their power.

Buehrens and Church articulate this position in “high” theological terms. Here, for example, is what they have to say about the Symbol of Faith:

What does this creed affirm about Jesus’s life and teachings? Not one thing. It states merely that he was born in an unusual way and died in an unusual way, telling us nothing about the fact that Jesus lived in an usual way. This is what is important about Jesus.

Buehrens and Church do an excellent job of defending their thesis, drawing not only from the great prophets of liberal religion (Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leo Tolstoy, etc.) but also from the Prophet Micah, the Apostle Paul, and other giants of the Old and New Testament. They’re compelling arguments; we Christians would benefit from wrestling with them. So, I figured I’d give it a whack.

As I was mulling over these questions, however, I realized that—in a roundabout way—they relate to the hot topic in online theology circles: “Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?”

Both questions, I think, boil down to a misunderstanding of what Christianity is: not a moral code or an abstract proposition, but a real-life relationship with the one God, living and true.

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I. Searching the Scriptures

Of course, there are plenty of ethical teachings in the Gospels. They’re laid out most succinctly in Christ’s lesson about the sheep and the goats. Christ commands us explicitly to feed the hungry, given water to the thirsty, shelter the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and imprisoned. Christ also makes it clear that our salvation hinges upon us performing these works of mercy. (See Matt. 25:31-46)

Yet, even here, we see that Christ’s ethical teachings are never divorced from His soteriological teachings. All of His “this-worldly” teachings also have some “other-worldly” dimension.

The opposite isn’t always true. To use an obvious example, only one of Christ’s sayings appears nearly word-for-word in all four Gospels:

1. “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” (Matt. 16:25)

2. “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.” (Mark 8:35)

3. “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.” (Luke 9:24)

4. “He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:25)

This isn’t an ethical teaching, but a soteriological one.

Indeed, so many of our favorite passages from the Gospel are purely metaphysical:

• “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” (Matt. 11:28-30)

• “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matt. 6:25-27)

• “Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” (Matt. 7:7-8)

Or take the Beatitudes—for instance, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” The Greek for pure of heart is katharoi te kardia; this is traditionally understood to mean single-minded. The soul that devotes itself completely to seeking God will find Him. Here we find one of His most profoundly mystical utterance sandwiched between two of His great ethical teachings: “Blessed are the merciful” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The ethical and the metaphysical are inseparable.

Not even the Greatest Commandment is purely ethical:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matt. 22:37-40)

Again, there’s no specific instruction on how we ought to conduct ourselves. This teaching isn’t about our behavior. Christ’s greatest commandment is about relationship.

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II. Members of the Body

Father Alexander Schmemann, of blessed memory, took such pains to emphasize this point. In the Church, everything is relational, interpersonal. Why? Because God personal: He is three Persons united by love in one Divinity.

“Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man,” Schmemann wrote. “But Christ who is both God and man broke down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.”

The Church is also a person. As Saint Paul says, “So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another” (Rom. 12:5).

This is both the most “progressive” and the most “traditionalist” teaching in the Gospel.

Put it this way. If I said to you, “Christianity is about building relationships,” you would probably assume I was some kind of lefty. Yet, in order for this phrase to be true in any meaningful way—in order for it to be something more than a mere slogan—it must be predicated on a traditional Christian metaphysics.

This is why the Symbol of Faith, the Nicene Creed, has so little to do with Christ’s ethical teachings. First of all, those are pretty straightforward. More importantly, though, it speaks to the relational nature of Christianity. If we’re to have a relationship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, then we have to know who they are.

Of course, we can never know any of them perfectly. Only God has perfect knowledge of God. But in order to have a relationship with a Person, we must have some idea of His personality.

So, is Christ a mere creature, as Arius claimed? Or is He God, as Athanasius insisted? Is Mary the Mother of God, as Saint Cyril argued? Or merely the mother of Christ, as Nestorius said? These are not academic quibbles. They have to do with the kind of person that is Jesus. We need to do our best to nail these details if we hope to build some kind of relationship with Him.

Now it must be asked: What is the nature of this relationship? The Fathers of the Church answered this question by pointing to a passage from Saint Peter, where the Chief of the Apostles declares that Christians are able to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). We achieve a state of perfect oneness with God, to the point where we cease to be mere humans and become divinized or deified—a process which the Fathers call theosis. As Saint Athanasius famously put it, “God became man so that man might become god.”

This is why Saint Paul says “God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). God literally consumes us, devours us. He brings us into Himself, assimilates us. Hence the frequent use of erotic imagery in Scripture. The lover desires to unite Himself with his beloved. The two yearn to become one in mind, body, and soul.

Now we see the poverty—the tragedy—of liberal religion. It perverts the fundamentally relational nature of Christianity. What is the Song of Songs if we strip away all the metaphysical content? A symbol without a referent. A metaphor for nothing.

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III. The Sign of Jonah

Understanding Christianity as fundamentally relational also helps us to understand the shape of our liturgical and spiritual tradition.

We say that, in baptism, the new Christian is marked with the Sign of Jonah (see Matthew 12:39-40). We go down with Christ into the waters of death; we rise again with Him in newness of life. The Church has always rejected the idea that baptism is a mere symbol. It is, rather, our ontological participation in the Paschal Mystery.

Likewise, the Church insists that the Holy Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. This is why the Lord says, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you”; for “he who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him” (John 6:53,56). Again, this is not a mere symbol. Holy Communion is the means by which Christ comes to dwell within us. It, too, creates an ontological change within the believer.

The same is true of our most ancient “private devotions”—for instance, the Holy Icons. Saint John Damascene famously explained how iconodulia is an affirmation of the Incarnation:

I do not venerate matter. I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked my salvation, and I will not cease from reverencing matter, through which my salvation was worked.

In other words, the Incarnation is not a single event in history. By uniting Himself to our flesh, God transformed matter itself. He changed, on a metaphysical level, the way that man relates to God. Yet He also changed the way that all material things relate to one another. Now, every relationship we have with every material thing—human, animal, plant, or mineral—is part of our dynamic with God.

Indeed, Damascene also emphasizes the role of icons as an affirmation of theosis. He says of the saints:

These are those who . . . have become assimilated to God as much as possible, who are truly called gods, not by nature, but by adoption, as iron heated in the fire is called fire, not by nature, but by its condition and participation in fire. . . . Just as they are truly gods, not by nature, but as partakers of God’s nature, so they are to be venerated, not by nature, but as having in themselves that which is venerable by nature.

So, we do not worship icons of Christ: we worship Christ through icons. Likewise, we do not worship the saints: we worship Christ through the saints. This is how completely we partake of the divine nature. This is the relational nature of Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

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IV. The God of Abraham

Now, moving on to the question of whether Muslims worship the same God we do.

Members of the Orthodox Church have rightly emphasized the continuity of the Old and New Covenants. They have pointed to the presence of the Preincarnate Logos in the Pentateuch, the Prophets’ anticipation of the Incarnation, Christ’s identification of Himself as the Yahweh (“I AM”), and recent scholarship demonstrating that the ancient Israelites worshipped a plurality of Divine Persons within a single Divinity.

These are excellent arguments. I’d like to build on them while remaining focused on the importance of relationship in the Christian faith, as taught in both the Old and the New Testaments.

Why did God create man? The answer, which is answered slowly over millennia, is this: He made us for relationship—specifically, friendship. God made us to be His friends.

This is clear from the Book of Genesis, where it says that Adam and Eve “heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8). This is confirmed in the Book of Proverbs:

Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman;
And I was daily His delight,
Rejoicing always before Him,
Rejoicing in His inhabited world,
And my delight was with the sons of men.

The Fall destroyed any possibility of friendship between God and man. It created a metaphysical wound—one that had to be healed before intimacy could be reestablished between Creator and Creation. This is the whole epic of Scripture. It is the coming of Christ, the Divine Metaphysician, to restore the bonds of love between Himself and the sons of Adam. This is why He says to His disciples, “No longer do I call you servants . . . but I have called you friends” (John 15:15).

Orthodox apologists, when debating the question of whether Muslims worship the true God, have pointed to this passage from John’s Gospel: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). This, too, underscores the profoundly relational nature of Christianity. Jesus Christ is, personally, the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the person of God the Father except by the person of God the Son.

Those who argue that Muslims worship the true God generally say that, while they mistake some of His properties, they do have the proper referent. Frankly, this strikes me as a meaningless proposition. It supposes that we can have some sort of abstract knowledge from God outside of a true relationship.

This is why Saint Dionysius the Areopagite says, “We must not dare to apply words and conceptions to this hidden, transcendent God. We can use only what Scripture has disclosed.” The Scriptures tell us that God is good, and Muslims may agree… at least in theory. But how could our limited concept of goodness possibly describe the infinite God? It can’t, of course. Rather, we understand true goodness—the goodness of God—by experiencing it firsthand, in relationship. This is why King David said, “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).

Likewise, the Scriptures tell us that God is just. This is a property that Muslims also affirm. And yet we hear Saint Isaac the Syrian cry, “Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you.” God loves the prodigal son no less than the dutiful son; how is this just? God pays all His laborers the same wage, whether they have worked from the first hour or the eleventh; how is this just?

Of course, God is just—but not in the way we think. We don’t work out some abstract concept of justice and then say, “God is like this.” No! We learn about justice by studying the lives and teachings of Christ and His saints. However God deals with us, that is justice.

So, maybe I’m too dense to understand the terms of the debate. But it seems to me that, if we were to say that Muslims worship the true God, we would be defeating the whole point of Christianity. We risk re-building that wall between God and man. Ours would cease to be a new life; it would be reduced to a mere “religion,” a purely human effort.

To put it another way: We may say that Muslims worship God in the same way that (per Saint Isaac) we call God “just.” It’s the kind of knowledge that brings error instead of truth, darkness rather than light.

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Conclusion: To Know Him as He Is

My hero George MacDonald said that, “When we receive the child in the name of Christ, the very childhood that we receive to our arms is humanity.”

What’s more: “To receive a child in the name of God is to receive God Himself. How to receive Him? As He alone can be received—by knowing Him as He is.”

This is something the ethicists and philosophers seem not to understand. We know God, not only with our minds, but with our arms and eyes and mouths.

There is no other way.

N.B. I’d like to offer the following correction/clarification, per the pinned tweet: Non-Christians are definitely capable of some knowledge of God. What’s problematic is the idea that Muslims have some special knowledge of God, beyond what other non-Christians are capable of. As Saint Gregory Palamas said, “For God is not only beyond knowledge, but also beyond unknowing.”