(Recently at) Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a widely respected Evangelical center in the Boston area, Miroslav Volf gave a lecture…He is…a professor at the Yale Divinity School. His book Allah: A Christian Response was recently published. Its central thesis was reiterated in the lecture at Gordon-Conwell: Yes, one can say that Christians and Muslims believe in the “same God”.

It has become common now to speak of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as constituting three forms of “Abrahamic faith”. I have not been able to nail down just when this term was first used. (To use another term of current interfaith politeness, this may be due to the fact that my Internet skills should properly be dated BCE—“before the common era”.) I have the impression that it came to be widely used in America in the wake of 9/11, with the altogether admirable intention of countering anti-Islamic hatred. In that it is similar to the term “Judaeo-Christian”, which originated around the 1950s with the similarly admirable intention of countering anti-Semitism.

In 1955 Will Herberg published an influential book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, in which he argued, among other things, that these three faiths now constituted a common foundation of the American creed. Even then this left out a lot of people—for example, the millions of Americans belonging to Eastern Orthodox Christian churches. The notion that “Abrahamic faith” now undergirds the political ideology of the United States naturally annoys American Hindus and Buddhists, not to mention agnostics, atheists and adherents of more exotic religions (how about Wiccans?!). But there has also been opposition to the usage within the three alleged religious cousins.

There was both Christian and Jewish resistance to the earlier term. Scholars from both communities criticized the term as substituting a fuzzy commonality for the sharp differences between the two faiths. But this criticism was somewhat muted, not only because just about all these scholars approved of the purpose of interfaith amity, but also because the continuity between Judaism and Christianity is hard to deny. After all, the most conservative Catholic or Protestant cannot overlook the fact that the Hebrew Bible is part of the canonical Christian Scriptures. (Indeed, in terms of sheer bulk, the New Testament looks like an appendix to the Old.) And the most Orthodox Jew cannot ignore the fact that Jesus was himself a Jew and that the earliest Christians constituted a movement (however heretical) within first-century Judaism. The Muslim case is not the same.

The way in which the Koran interprets Judaism and Christianity is hardly compatible with the self-understanding of these religions. Even the most liberal Christians, who might approve the recitation of Muslim prayers at some ecumenical events, are unlikely to advocate the inclusion of the Koran in the Biblical canon. But some Muslims have not been happy either. An interesting development occurred in Malaysia in 2010. An Islamic group asked the state to forbid Christians to use the name “Allah” both in Malay translations of the Bible and in church worship. The contention was that the name “Allah” properly refers to the God proclaimed by the Prophet Muhammad, and to no one else. The High Court rejected this request. There were anti-Christian riots to protest this decision and some people were killed during attacks on churches.

On November 29, 2011, The Christian Century carried a story about an event that occurred earlier in the month at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a widely respected Evangelical center in the Boston area. Miroslav Volf gave a lecture there, evidently provoking a lively debate. Volf is a very learned and much published Protestant theologian of Croatian origin. I think he can fairly be described as an open-minded, moderate Evangelical. He used to teach for a while at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, one of the centers of the current revival of Evangelical theology; he is now a professor at the Yale Divinity School. His book Allah: A Christian Response was recently published. Its central thesis was reiterated in the lecture at Gordon-Conwell: Yes, one can say that Christians and Muslims believe in the “same God”.

There are enough common affirmations to justify this—most importantly, of course, the belief that there is only one God (what the late Richard Niebuhr, coincidentally another Yale Divinity professor, called “radical monotheism”)—but also the belief in a personal creator distinct from the creation, and the giver of a moral code. Volf said that his position was one of “political theology”, rather than a statement of what is required for salvation.

I understand this to mean that Christians, without giving up their faith in the unique salvation provided through Jesus Christ, have enough in common with Muslims to collaborate in seeking justice and a better society. The audience at Volf’s lecture was divided. He was warmly received, and some agreed with him. The opposition was succinctly summarized by a seminary student: “At stake is the gospel. If you are saying to a Muslim, ‘See, there is common ground between us, and then there shall be peace’, essentially you have nullified the need for the gospel”.

How one comes out on this will obviously depend on one’s own theological position.

Both Christian and Jewish conservatives are likely to be at least uncomfortable with the notion that theirs is an “Abrahamic faith”. [Full disclosure: As a theologically liberal Lutheran, I have no problem with the term.] But I think that one can temporarily bracket one’s understanding of one’s own faith, and look at the issue objectively—that is, truth claims set aside, trying to assess descriptively what the three religions do and what they do not have in common. If one does that, I further think that both those who say no to the idea of “Abrahamic faith” and those who say yes are right in a way.

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