{"id":5947,"date":"2015-12-16T12:36:03","date_gmt":"2015-12-16T18:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=5947"},"modified":"2015-12-16T12:39:14","modified_gmt":"2015-12-16T18:39:14","slug":"wheaton-god-and-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=5947","title":{"rendered":"WHEATON, GOD, AND ISLAM"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>If you are following the news, you are well aware of the Wheaton professor who has been put on leave pending a review of her theological position.\u00a0 I won&#8217;t comment on the controversy directly as some details are still forthcoming.\u00a0 What I will offer are quotes (both made long before the present controversy) by two theologians followed by my own reflections.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Miroslav Volf: \u201c&#8230;all Christians don&#8217;t worship the same God, and all Muslims don&#8217;t worship the same God. But I think that Muslims and Christians who embrace the normative traditions of their faith refer to the same object, to the same Being, when they pray, when they worship, when they talk about God. The referent is the same. The description of God is partly different.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Timothy George: \u201cIs the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? The answer is surely Yes and No. Yes, in the sense that the Father of Jesus is the only God there is. \u2026 Christians and Muslims can together affirm many important truths about this great God\u2014his oneness, eternity, power, majesty. \u2026 But the answer is also No, for Muslim theology rejects the divinity of Christ and the personhood of the Holy Spirit\u2014both essential components of the Christian understanding of God. \u2026 Apart from the Incarnation and the Trinity, it is possible to know\u00a0<em>that<\/em>\u00a0God is, but not\u00a0<em>who<\/em>\u00a0God is.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>My thoughts: Trinitarianism doesn&#8217;t make God &#8220;partly different&#8221; contra Miroslav Volf. Timothy George&#8217;s statement is irenic and clarifies the seminal issue.\u00a0 Yes, we are called to love. Jesus made that eminently clear. But a call to love is not a call to blur crucial theological realities. Volf likes to use the description of &#8220;sufficiently similar&#8221; when it comes to Christian and Muslim&#8217;s view of God.\u00a0 This strikes me as special pleading.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you are following the news, you are well aware of the Wheaton professor who has been put on leave pending a review of her theological position.\u00a0 I won&#8217;t comment on the controversy directly as some details are still forthcoming.\u00a0 What I will offer are quotes (both made long before the present controversy) by two [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,73,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","category-islam","category-jesus"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5947"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5951,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5947\/revisions\/5951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}