With God, Bush Is on the Right Side

December 13, 2003
By Jack Miles

The president was correct in saying Muslims and
Christians worship the same deity

During his trip to Britain last month, President Bush
scandalized some of his evangelical fans by innocently
asserting that Muslims and Christians worship the same
God.

Evangelical theologian Richard Land, speaking for the
scandalized, rebuked the president for what Land calls
playing "theologian in chief." In Land's view, "when
President Bush concludes that Muslims and Christians
worship the same God, he is simply mistaken."

In my view, Bush is, at least on this point, a better
theologian than his critics.

Though Land neither confirms nor denies that Jews and
Christians worship the same God, surely he would
concede that the first Christians - Jews all - did not
understand Christian discipleship to entail switching
to a new God. But what of the first Muslims? If they
too understood themselves to be worshiping the god of
the Jews, then were they not necessarily worshiping
the god of the Christians as well?

The Koran identifies Allah as none other than the God
to whom Abraham offered "submission" (or "islam") in
the episode Jews and Christians know so well from
Genesis 22, the story of the binding of Isaac.

As the paradigmatic Muslim, or "submitter," Abraham
then made the original paradigmatic pilgrimage to
Mecca, Muslims believe, accompanied by the very son,
Ishmael, whom Allah had rescued so dramatically.

Jews and Christians have always believed that Muhammad
got this story wrong. It was Isaac, not Ishmael, who
was bound, they believe, and Abraham made no such
pilgrimage to Mecca. But have Jews and Christians also
believed, historically, that Muhammad had the divine
protagonist wrong as well - to the point that he was
referring to another deity altogether?

This, it seems, is Land's assumption when he
writes: "There is only one true God and his name is
Jehovah, not Allah."

Centuries of Jewish and Christian thinkers, however,
have assumed just the opposite: that Jews, Christians
and Muslims have always assumed their differences to
be about the character rather than the identity of
God.

In late medieval Spain, for instance, where the three
religions mingled freely and the best scholars spoke
Latin, Arabic and Hebrew, a number of famous
theological debates took place in which all
participants transparently assumed that all other
participants were speaking of - and disagreeing about -
the same divine subject.

Perhaps the most strenuous of all such medieval
wrestling matches was the silent, private bout between
Thomas Aquinas and Abul Walid Mohammed ibn Rushd, the
earlier Muslim philosopher whom the West knows as
Averroes. Aquinas wrote his immense "Summa Contra
Gentiles" in good part to refute Rushd, but he never
saw fit to take what would have been the terribly
convenient "mistaken identity" shortcut. He never
claimed (in the manner of Richard Land) that whatever
his Muslim forebear had said about God was irrelevant
because the man was simply speaking of another deity,
a strange god, a holy somebody else.

Muslim assumptions on the same point are, if anything,
even more formally enshrined in tradition than Jewish
and Christian assumptions.

Muslims battled those who worshipped false gods,
beginning with the Arab polytheists of Mecca and
Medina, but they officially tolerated Jews and
Christians because they understood the latter to be
worshiping the one true God, or, in Arabic, Allah.
Regrettably, or so Muslims believed, Jews and
Christians had adulterated the primeval, pure "islam"
of Abraham with an assortment of pagan errors, but
that all the same these "peoples of the book" were not
worshiping a false god.

I do not mean to deny that theological differences
exist among Jews, Christians and Muslims, or that
these many differences matter. Yet there remains an
immense common holding as well. One need only view the
three Abrahamic religions from Benares or Kyoto to
realize this. All three teach that God is the creator
and God will someday end the world he created. All
three say that God will show himself as a judge on the
last day, and that the criterion for his judgment will
be not worldly greatness but moral integrity. The list
of commonalities can be extended just as easily as the
list of differences.

As for the political context of Bush's London remark,
it has to matter to all Americans that, thanks in part
to evangelical aggressiveness, much of the Muslim
world believes that the U.S. war on terror is a war on
Islam or, worse, an American-led Christian war on
Islam.

The president - in his proper capacity as political
rather than theological leader - ought to miss no
opportunity to repudiate this view. His recent remark
puts him squarely in the Christian mainstream and
should be welcomed as a small step in the right
direction.

Jack Miles is a MacArthur Fellow and author of "God: A
Biography" (Vintage, 1996). A longer version of this
article appeared on Beliefnet.com.