The Rev Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, is on record saying about Islam ‘I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion’. More extreme still, past president of the Southern Baptist Convention in the US, the Rev Jerry Vines, is on record saying that Muhammad, Islam’s founder, is ‘a demon possessed paedophile.’ Clearly neither believes that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.

In his inaugural sermon as Dean of St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney, the Very Rev Phillip Jensen made the logically valid point that, given their competing truth claims, not every religion can be true. Dean Jensen went on to characterise false religions, ie non-Christian religions, as evil and satanic, leading their followers astray from the true God. He didn’t specify Islam but the implication was there.

Atheists say that no religion is true; all are false. Spiritualising relativists – probably Australia’s largest religious group (behind the census façade of nominal membership of Christian churches) – tend to see all mainstream religions as true; each pointing to the same God or to the same transcendent or supernatural realm. But is this so?

Given the current state of the world, with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists attacking the West, and the West engaged in a War On Terror against these Islamists, do Muslims and Christians actually worship the same God?

A look back into history, and by no means just the period of the Crusades (1095-1261), demonstrates that both religions have been exceedingly violent; not only violent towards each other, but internally violent. For example in recent times witness the Protestant/Catholic conflict in Northern Ireland or the Sunni/Shia conflict in Iraq.

An impartial, say, extraterrestrial observer would have good reason to conclude that both religions worshipped the same god of violence, terror and war. History negates the claim of either religion, as fact rather than theory, to be a peaceable religion. ‘Yes’ the extraterrestrial observer would say ‘they worship the same ugly, destructive, violent god.’

No average Middle-Eastern Muslim witnessing the Coalition of the Willing’s attack on oil rich Islamic Iraq against non existent weapons of mass destruction – led by publicly confessed Christians Tony Blair and George Bush (with occasional church attender John Howard completing the Coalition of the Willing) – could fail to think the Christian God is other than violent.

In a theological vein it is argued, truthfully, that Islam and Christianity (along with Judaism) are both religions of the Book and of Abraham. That is to say, both accept the Divine revelation of the Hebrew Bible (Christian ‘Old Testament’) and both look back to God as revealed to Abraham as their faith’s foundation. Thus it can be contended that Christians and Muslims ultimately do worship the same God.

Certainly common ancestry in Abraham, and common recognition of the Hebrew Bible, form a basis for conversation between Muslims and Christians that is not available to, say, Christians and Hindus or Muslims and Buddhists. But is Muhammad’s ‘Allah’ the same God as Jesus’ ‘Father in Heaven’?

Sometimes this question is debated in a silly manner as a matter of mere words. You hear Christians saying, for example, that ‘we worship God, they worship Allah’, little realising that ‘Allah’ was a word first used to refer to the One that English speakers call ‘God’, not by Muslims but by Palestinian Christians.

More profoundly (but not very profound) popularly the question about ‘Allah’ and the ‘Father in Heaven’ is dealt with as a matter of authority – authority of doctrine or dogma or belief.

So we hear Christians saying ‘Muslims accept the Quran as God’s word and reject the true Word of God, the Bible, so obviously they don’t worship the same true God’. Or we hear said ‘Muslims only accept Jesus as a prophet, not as the Son of God, therefore they worship a different god.’ No case is actually argued, it’s just a matter of comparative authorities: and no doubt popular Islam gives tit-for-tat, the Quran superior to the Bible, Muhammad to Jesus (though as a prophet Muslims popularly give more respect to Jesus than Christians give to Muhammad).

As with the Jews and Greeks of St Paul’s time, the big barrier for Muslims about the Christian understanding of Christ is the crucifixion (see I Corinthians 1), where God’s nature is revealed by weakness, suffering and death: not by overwhelming, violent power giving victory over enemies (common Jewish expectation in Paul’s time), nor by some unveiling of hitherto hidden knowledge (the Greek intellectual expectation).

This ‘death of God’ by sinful human hands reveals the violence at the core of the human heart and that all human civilization and culture, religion included, is soaked in violence. (In the Bible Cain, who murdered his brother Abel, is the founder of civilization!)

What the death of Jesus revealed, and what most of us Christians have still not taken to heart 2000 years later, is that God is not violent and does not use violence to counter the evil of violence. The gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection appearances underscore the revelation that God is non-violent. Jesus the innocent victim of execution does not return to wreak vengeance on his killers but to say ‘peace be with you’(Luke 24:36).

Unlike Jesus, but like Joshua or David in the Hebrew Bible, Muhammad did employ violence against the violence and treachery of his enemies. For example, in 624 Muhammad led his troops to victory over his former Meccan tribe the Quraysh and did the same again, more overwhelmingly, at the famous Battle of Trench in 625. Afterwards, all the males of a Jewish tribe (the Qurayzah) who’d sided with his enemies at Trench were killed and their women and children sold as slaves. This behaviour is as far from the Jesus of gospels, though not from most Christians of history and today, as the stars are from the earth.

Jesus’ ‘Father in Heaven’ is absolutely non-violent. Thus far in human history only people such as the early Christian martyrs and Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King seem to have comprehended this. By allowing himself to be the innocent victim, Jesus exposed the violence at the core of every human heart, culture and civilisation.

While Muslims and Christians, fantasising that they are innocent victims of evil enemies, continue to act with violence against each other, and against their own, they each certainly worship much the same God – but a different God from Jesus’ ‘Father in Heaven’.

Market Place

[The author wishes to remain anonymous]

May 2006