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Introduction

Heresy or Idolatry?

It is recent, yet it is also one of the oldest controversies in the troubled relationship between Christianity and Islam. In December 2015, Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins was suspended after pledging to wear a hijab during Advent in support of her Muslim neighbors, and after writing in a Facebook post that Muslims “like me, a Christian, are people of the book, and as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” On December 22, the college stated that the suspension resulted “from theological convictions that seem inconsistent with Wheaton College’s doctrinal convictions,” suggesting the action was not due to wearing the hijab. Hawkins was asked to clarify certain “significant theological questions” such as how can Christians worship the same God if Muslims cannot affirm that “God the Father is indeed the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” On February 6, 2016, the college announced that Hawkins would not be fired, but that she would voluntarily resign in order to close the situation, whereupon she found a new position at the University of Virginia.

The affair reignited a controversy that is as old as Christianity’s first engagement with Islam. What do Christians and Muslims mean when they respectively utter the name “God”? Of course, a Muslim might not utter the English name “God,” but the English is simply a translation from the name used in ancient Hebrew (yhwh)¹ or ancient Greek (o theos), and German and French Christians use the names “Gott” and “Dieu” for the same divine being. The question is: Who are they referring to? Are Christians and Muslims referring to the same divine being when they utter the name that corresponds to “God” in their own languages?

If the same, the situation is one of mutual charges of heresy. In his book De Haeresibus, probably written at Saint Sabas monastic community around 724, John of Damascus says that the Muslims call Christians Hetaeriasts, or “Associators,” because Christians introduce an associate with God by declaring Christ to be the Son of God and God.² John replies, “you speak untruly when you call us Hetaeriasts; we retort by calling you Mutilators of God.” On this account, Muslims and Christians accuse each other of being heretics, but this is only possible when both are referring to the same being. Neither would have accused the ancient Greeks of heresy for any of their beliefs about Zeus, for the ancient Greeks were idolators: worshippers of a false god. But when John says that Muslims are “mutilators of God,” it is the Christian God he is referring to. Muslims, according to him, have false beliefs about the true God. Peter the Venerable (1092–1156) also saw Islam as a vile form of heresy.³

If, on the other hand, Christians and Muslims are referring to different supernatural beings, we have mutual charges of idolatry. In his Refutatio Mohamedis (c. 870 AD), a long and frequently abusive polemic about how the “camel driver” Muhammad deceived the Agarenes (Muslims) into worshipping a false god, an apostate demon, who had “appropriated the divine name,” Niketas Byzantios accused Muslims of idolatry.

Their god is the devil, who imitates God, although, fearing he fails in his purpose, he is cunningly silent about [his] proper name, that is notorious among all men, and rather brings before himself the name of the true God.⁴

Niketas argues on mainly philosophical and linguistic grounds, distinguishing between an empty name, which has no proper object, and a name which has been abstracted from its proper object and applied to something alien, neither of these being a true name, which signifies the true nature [logos] of its bearer, and which principally denotes the bearer.

As the name of one thing [is applied] to the wrong thing, and as a bearer of one name [is applied] to the wrong name, that leads to error.⁵

According to Niketas, it follows from the semantic properties of the name “God” that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God.

The disagreement is therefore not just about different and inconsistent belief systems. Everyone agrees that Christianity and Islam have considerable theological differences. Muslims do not believe in a Trinity (“Praise be to God who has never begotten a son”).⁶ Christians do believe in such a thing (“For there are three . . . the Father, the Logos and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.”⁷ Muslims recognize the historical existence of Jesus, but do not believe he was crucified and rose from the dead, whereas belief in the resurrection is an article of faith for Christians. Everyone agrees that the two faiths are in disagreement about these beliefs; the problem is what the beliefs are about. When a Christian says “God is triune” and a Muslim says “Allah is not triune,” do they contradict one another or not? John says they do, for they assert contradictory predicates of the same God. Niketas says they do not, for one asserts of the Christian God that he is triune, the other asserts of the nameless demon that he is not triune.

The difference between John and Niketas has striking parallels with the recent Hawkins controversy. To some, mostly fundamentalist Christians, it seemed obvious that a God who apparently rewards suicide bombers with a place in paradise can’t be the God they worship. Others argued that the fundamental conceptions of the deity are too different. The Revd. Dr. Magdy Gendy, lately of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, said, “I worship the triune God. The God they worship is none of my business,” when he was interviewed by Christianity Today.⁸ This is essentially Niketas’s position.

By contrast, the academic philosophers who entered the debate mostly took the side of John of Damascus. Edward Feser argued that we cannot understand the deep theological differences unless we understand “the true nature of Islam as a kind of ‘heresy’, a transformation of Christianity rather than an entirely novel religion.”⁹ Other analytic theologians, such as Francis Beckwith and Dale Tuggy, also argued that Christians and Muslims do, in fact, worship the same God. Baylor philosophy professor Francis Beckwith held that incomplete knowledge or a false belief about God doesn’t mean Muslims are worshipping a different being. Otherwise they couldn’t have false beliefs about God. Yale theologian Miroslav Volf thought 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.”¹⁰

Arizona philosopher William F. Vallicella took a different line, which is the starting point for this book. He argued, against Beckwith and Tuggy, that it is not at all obvious which of the following views is correct.

View 1: Christian and Muslim can worship the same God, even though one of them must have a false belief about¹¹ God, whether it be the belief that God is non-triune or the belief that God is triune.

View 2: Christian and Muslim must worship different Gods precisely because they have mutually exclusive conceptions of God. So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.¹²

The question of which view is correct requires deep investigation into the philosophy of language, Vallicella argued, and it requires an explanation of how reference is achieved. How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the world? What makes our utterance of “Socrates” signify Socrates rather than someone or something else? What makes my use of “God” (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?

The question also exposes a fault line running through the whole of contemporary analytic philosophy, indeed it is older than that. We may hold with Frege, Russell, Searle, and many others that reference is routed through, and determined by, some sort of descriptive sense, whereby a singular term identifies or picks out an external object by means of an associated uniquely applying description. If this is how reference operates, “God” refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the description, and hence there are different descriptive senses attaching to the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God.

D1: “the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is non-triune”;

D2: “the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.”

Clearly no one entity can satisfy both D1 and D2. Although the descriptions overlap, nothing can be both non-triune and triune, hence if reference is determined by description, the Christian and the Muslim cannot be referring to the same being.

Alternatively, we may hold, with John Stuart Mill, and contemporary philosophers of language like Nathan Salmon, that the proper name like “God” refers directly, with no intermediary descriptive content. Mill compared a proper name to a chalk mark on a door, a symbol assigned to the object itself, so that we may understand which thing is spoken of. This will not work if the object is not revealed to us, but Kripke and others have argued that the use of a name can be causally connected to its bearer, so that (for example) the Christian’s use of “God” can be traced back though a long causal chain to an initial baptism, as it were, of God by, say, Moses on Mount Sinai. If so, the question of whether Muslims and Christians refer to the same God depends on the existence of the right causal connection, rather than any descriptive content. Anglican bishop Mouneer Hanna Anis of Egypt said, “For us as Christians, and only by his grace, God has revealed himself in the person of his son Jesus Christ, whom Muslims do not know in this way.”¹³ If he is right, then Christians and Muslims do not refer to the same being by the names “God” and “Allah,” respectively, but not because of the different descriptions they associate with God. Christian Trinitarians and Unitarians have fundamentally different conceptions of the nature of God, yet the causal connection determining their use of the name “God” is the same.

At the time of writing, the debate between descriptive and direct reference theories of proper names is a live one (with direct reference being something like the “orthodox” view). Its immediate roots are in the early twentieth century, but it is older, and it is closely related to the problem of individuation, fiercely disputed in the Middle Ages. The medieval “scholastic” philosophers took as their starting point Porphyry’s hierarchical classification of genera and species from the most general genus down to the most specific species and individuals. Thus, Socrates is a living being, an animal, a rational animal, and so on. But what particular feature makes him Socrates, and not some other person? Porphyry thought that an individual (ἄτομα) consists of properties (ιδιοτήτων) “of which the combination will never be the same in any other, for the properties of Socrates can never be the same in any other particular persons.”¹⁴ Yet, as Peter Abelard (1079–1142) argued,¹⁵ the accidental properties connected with some description can hardly enter into the imposition of the signification of the name, or the name would change its meaning through time. “Socrates was called Socrates before he became a musician, and will be so called after he ceases to be the son of Sophroniscus [i.e., after Sophroniscus dies].”¹⁶ The philosopher theologian John Duns Scotus (c.1265–1308) developed a complex theory of an individuating difference, or “thisness,” a feature that makes a person that person, and no other. Few philosophers have followed him, but the problem of individuation remains a problem, and it is clearly related to that of reference to individuals. Does the name “Socrates” mean “curly-headed white man, skilled in music and philosophy, son of Sophroniscus”? Or does it signify a purely, that is, non-complex, individuating feature that distinguishes him from all others? It is one of the oldest and most intractable problems in philosophy.

My purpose in this book is to develop a theory of reference that will answer the question of whether the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures refer to the same God, moreover answer it within a semantic framework that is equally acceptable to both atheists and fideists.¹⁷ It is primarily a work in the core topics of philosophical logic, namely reference, identity, truth, and existence. The main thesis is that all reference is story-relative. We cannot tell which historical individual a person is talking or writing about or addressing in prayer without familiarity with the narrative (oral or written), which introduces that individual to us. Thus, we cannot understand reference to God, nor to his prophets, nor to any other character mentioned in the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim scriptures, without reference to those very scriptures. In this context, we must understand God as the person who “walked in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8), and who is continuously referred to in the books of the Old and New Testament, as well as (I argue) the Quran. Singular reference and singular conception is empty outside such a context.

No substantive original thesis in biblical hermeneutics or theology is intended, although I will try to use the most recent scholarly views in both topics, and clearly there will be some theological implications of what is primarily a philosophical thesis. For example, the “classical” conception of God, namely as uncaused, uncreated, unchanging, and transcendent creator of the universe, can clearly be arrived at by some process of natural reason, unaided by revelation (except the “revelation” of pure reason), and independently of scriptural authority. But if we cannot understand the name “God” without reference to biblical texts, reason on its own cannot reveal God to us.

The method will be, as far as possible, to avoid the technical apparatus and terminology of modern mathematical logic. Technical concepts (singular reference, identity, subject and predicate, proposition, and so on) are unavoidable, but will be presented in the context of biblical narrative in a way that clearly illustrates the concepts, showing rather than explicitly describing them. No position on the existence or non-existence of God, or of his nature, or of the truth or falsity of any of the three scriptures, is intended, nor should any be understood.

NOTES

1. Strictly speaking, the English expression “God” is almost never used to translate the tetragrammaton. It translates elohim, a common noun meaning “god” or “gods.” “Y hw h” is a proper name that is used much less frequently. The only instances in which “Y hw h” is translated as “God” are passages containing the combination of words “adonai Y hw h,” meaning “the lord Y hw h,” occurs, conventionally translated as “the lord GOD,” the capitals corresponding to the tetragrammaton in the Hebrew text.

2. John of Damascus, Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 94, 767.

3. Translated Resnick, 2016.

4. Niketas Byzantios (Niketas of Byzantium), Confutatio dogmatum Mahomedis, in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 105, 792, my emphasis.

5. Ibid., 793.

6. Quran 17:111.

7. 1 John 5:7.

8. Jayson Casper, “What Arab Christians Think of Wheaton-Hawkins ‘Same God’ Debate: Controversy echoes what Mideast Christians have wrestled with for centuries,” Christianity Today, January 13, 2016, my emphasis.

9. Edward Feser, “Liberalism and Islam,” 2016, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/liberalism-and-islam.html.

10. Bob Smietana, “Wheaton College Suspends Hijab-Wearing Professor after ‘Same God’ Comment,” Christianity Today, December 15, 2015.

11. My emphasis.

12. William F. Vallicella, “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?” Typepad, December 22, 2015, https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/12/do-christians-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god.html.

13. Jayson Casper, Christianity Today, January 13, 2016, my emphasis.

14. Porphyry, Isagoge, in Busse 1887, 7, trans. Owen, O.F., The Organon, or Logical Treatises of Aristotle, 617.

15. Peter Abelard, Dialectica, in De 569 (f. 197r–v), see also Ashworth, “Medieval theories of singular terms.”

16. Ibid., Antequam musicus esset, Socrates dictus est, vel postquam filius Sophronisci non erit, Socrates dicetur.

17. Which would be impossible, for instance, if the semantic theory involved Russellian propositions, supposedly Platonic entities expressed by sentences which “entrap” their components. If the sentence “God is Allah” expressed such a proposition, God (and Allah) would be such an entrapped component. Alston (Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience, 10) faces a similar difficulty. His book is designed for a general audience, so he avoids terms like “awareness of God,” which suggest that God exists, preferring to speak of experiences that are “taken by the subject to be an awareness of God.” But this still requires using the term “God,” and so requires a semantic theory, acceptable to believers and non-believers alike, that explains the term “God.”