Dave Andrews on the Wheaton College great ‘same God’ debate.

The suspension of Wheaton College professor, Larycia Hawkins has become international news.

On December 17 2015 Ruth Graham reported in The Atlantic that ‘Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College, was placed on administrative leave on Tuesday after suggesting that believers in the two faiths do indeed follow the same God. Hawkins has also been wearing a hijab—the headscarf worn by many Muslim women—as a gesture of what she calls “embodied solidarity” with Muslims this month. She pledged to wear it throughout the Advent season, including while she teaches at the Illinois liberal-arts college, and while flying to her home state of Oklahoma, which in 2010 passed a constitutional amendment banning its courts from considering Islamic Sharia law in decisions.

‘In a statement posted to Facebook on December 10, Hawkins explained the gesture this way: “I don’t love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American. I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity. I stand in human solidarity with my Muslim neighbor because we are formed of the same primordial clay, descendants of the same cradle of humankind–a cave in Sterkfontein, South Africa I had the privilege to descend into to plumb the depths of our common humanity in 2014. I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

‘It’s that last bit that Wheaton apparently objected to. In a brief statement issued Tuesday, the college said Hawkins had been placed on leave “in response to significant questions regarding the theological implications of statements that [Hawkins] has made about the relationship of Christianity to Islam.” In a longer follow-up the next day, the college clarified that Hawkins’s views, “including that Muslims and Christians worship the same God,” seem to conflict with the school’s Statement of Faith, which all faculty must sign annually.’

This has become international news because the conflict between Christians and Muslims is international and any attempt to rebuild bridges of connection across the chasm of division and suspicion has opened between our communities has taken on international significance.

You only need to look at the coverage that documentary maker Michael Moore got, when he protested Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims entering the U.S. by picketing outside Trump Towers in New York with a sign which read ‘We are all Muslims’ until he was moved on by police, to see how even the smallest individual single-person attempt to rebuild bridges of connection between Christians and Muslims can take on really big international significance.

Unfortunately, the adverse reaction of the administration of this famous conservative evangelical Christian college to Larycia’s attempt to rebuild a bridge of connection between Christians and Muslims, by wearing a ‘hijab’ and affirming that ‘we worship the same God’, has blown up the bridge she was building in her face, and the watching world has been impacted by the blast.

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My dear friend, Stephen Paul Aram, a 1972 graduate of Wheaten College, said that when he heard ‘that Dr. Hawkins was wearing a head-scarf for advent, I was really pleased. It takes courage for her to stand up for and stand beside our Muslim neighbors at this time. Theologically, it beautifully reflects the act of Jesus, who became a human being to walk with us. That’s why we are celebrating Christmas right now’. But, Steve said, he still ‘has questions about what Dr. Hawkins means in saying that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. If she is affirming that there is only one real God out there, that there is a God-shaped hole in every person’s heart and that all religions include attempts to understand God and make an appropriate response to God, then I agree with her. But if she is saying that Muslims and Christians have the same understanding of what that God is like, then I have to disagree’. And Steve said, as an alumnus, he still stands by ‘Wheaton College’s right and responsibility to stand for something, to carefully define their best understanding of what it means to create a truly faithful Christian community for their students. When I was a student I didn’t agree with every standard that was set for me. But I really appreciated living in a community that took theology and accountability to God seriously.’

But, as in all these contentious situations, the careful nuances, checks and balances of Steve’s statements will be ignored as the media generates an argument between Christians and between Christians and Muslims over whether ‘we worship the same God’ – or not – which will only make matters worse. Mary Elizabeth Fisher says ‘Muslims are watching the Christian world, particularly the Evangelical world, to see how they respond. It will create further tensions for them.’

Already, Professor Miroslav Volf, Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, “one of the most celebrated theologians of our day” whose book Allah: A Christian Response, Hawkins cited, has weighed into the debate saying her suspension discloses Christian ‘anti-Muslim bigotry’.

Volf says Hawkins ‘did not insist that Christians and Muslims believe the same things about that one God. She did not state that Islam and Christianity are the same religion under a different name, or even that Islam is equally as true as Christianity. She did not deny that God was incarnate in Christ. Neither did she contest that the one God is the Holy Trinity. Which, among other things, distinguish Christian faith from Islam. There isn’t any theological justification for Hawkins’s forced administrative leave. Her suspension is not about theology and orthodoxy. It is about enmity toward Muslims. More precisely, her suspension reflects enmity toward Muslims, taking on a theological guise of concern for Christian orthodoxy.’

Volf says ‘What is theologically wrong with asserting that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, according to Hawkins’s opponents, is that Muslims deny the Trinity and incarnation, and, therefore, the Christian God and Muslim God cannot be the same. But the conclusion doesn’t square. For centuries, a great many Orthodox Jews have strenuously objected to those same Christian convictions: Christians are idolaters because they worship a human being, Jesus Christ, and Christians are polytheists because they worship “Father, Son and the Spirit” rather than the one true God of Israel. What was the Christian response? Christian theologians neither insisted that they worship a different God than Jews nor did they accuse Jews of idolatry. Instead of rejecting the God of the Jews, Christians affirmed that they worship the same God as the Jews, but noted that the two religious groups understand God in in partly different ways.’

Volf asks the question: ‘Why is the Christian response to Muslim denial of the Trinity and the incarnation not the same as the response to similar Jewish denial? Why are many Christians today unable to say that Christians and Muslims worship the same God but understand God in partly different ways?’ Then, Volf provides his answers his own question, saying that: ‘Many Christians today see themselves at war with the Islamic State and, by a deeply problematic extension, with the Islam itself. War, like enmity in general, requires clear and hard boundaries. We define our enemies as what we are not; we take any blurring of those boundaries as a threat to the legitimacy of our enmity. In the realm of political action, such sharp and hard boundaries, as the writer David Brooks recently noted, result in the kind of demagoguery we hear from Donald Trump, who belligerently places Muslims, along with others who disagree with him, before “the following bigoted choice: Submit or be rejected.” In the realm of religious convictions, enmity demands exclusivity of in-group convictions. It is not just that we insist that we aren’t our enemies; we cannot have anything in common with them either. When Hawkins justified her solidarity with Muslims by noting that as a Christian she worships the same God as Muslims, she committed the unpardonable sin of removing the enemy from the category of “alien” and “purely evil” other. She also drew attention to the simple fact that most Muslims aren’t enemies.’

Tragically, I think there is more than a little truth in what Volf says, and many of my Muslim friends are acutely aware of the bigotry reflected in the disparity between the traditional Christian response to the Jewish view of God and the typical Christian reaction to the Muslim view of God.

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As an evangelical Christian myself let me finish these reflections by meditating on two verses from the gospels, both of them quotes from Jesus. The first is: “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Luke 11:23), And the second is: “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Luke 9:50).

On the surface of it, these two statements seem completely contradictory. If the first of these statements is taken at face value it would seem to justify Christian exclusion of Muslims. ‘Whoever is not for us, is against us!’ If the second of these statements is taken at face value it would seem to justify Christian inclusion of Muslims. ‘Whoever is not against us, is for us!’

In the circumstances in which we find ourselves is vital that we know how to interpret and apply these texts accurately, so as Christians we can know how to engage Muslims appropriately.

In order to interpret the first text accurately we need to interpret it in context. The context is a difficult context for many modern readers to relate to. Jesus has just delivered a person from ‘demonic possession’. In response to the criticism that he is delivering people from ‘demonic possession’ by ‘demonic power’, Jesus says: ‘If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? And if I drive out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges. But if I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can rob his house.’ Then Jesus says the famous words: ‘Whoever is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters’. Matthew 12:26-30

‘The picture of gathering and scattering may come from shepherding; he who is not helping to keep the flock safe by bringing it into the fold is driving it out to the dangers of the hills. In this one piercing sentence Jesus lays down the impossibility of neutrality. W. C. Allen writes: “In this war against Satan, there are only two sides, for Christ or against him, gathering with (Christ) or scattering with Satan.” A (person) has to choose (a) side; abstention from choice is no way out, because the refusal to give one side assistance is in fact giving of support to the other.’

‘He that is not with me is against me’, is not a test we ought to apply to others so much as to ourselves. We all need to ask ourselves the question: ‘Am I “on the Lord’s side”, working for the common good with Christ, who personifies good for both Christians and Muslims, or am I trying to shuffle through life in a state of cowardly neutrality, aiding and abetting Satan, who personifies evil for both Christians and Muslims, by saying nothing good and/or doing nothing good myself?’

It should be noted that the indicator of whether we are saying or doing anything good is whether we are ‘gathering’ people – bringing them together – or ‘scattering’ people – driving them apart!

In order to interpret the second text accurately we need to interpret it in context. The context is again a difficult context for many modern readers to relate to as he disciples have just seen someone from a group, other than ‘Jesus’ group’, delivering a person from ‘demonic possession’ in ‘the name of Jesus’. The situation may be strange, but the issue it raises is all too familiar. John, Jesus’ disciple, came up to Jesus and said: ‘“Teacher, we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.” “Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us. I tell you the truth, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to Christ will certainly not lose his reward”.’ Mark 9. 38-41

‘Whoever is not against us is for us,’ is a test we ought to apply to our attitude towards others. We need to make sure our attitude is inclusive, not exclusive, like Jesus, not like Jesus’ disciples.

It was never Jesus’ intention to start a religion, still less a religion that saw itself in competition with other religions for people’s allegiance. Jesus said he simply came ‘to bring life and life in all its fullness’ (see John 10:10). Thus he would 1 confirm all that is life-affirming and 2 confront all that is life-negating in the world’s religions – especially in the religion that now bears his name.

Jesus believed in the One God. The One God Muslims refer to as ‘Allah’. ‘Allah’ is not the Muslim name for God, still less the name of a Muslim God, but the Arabic name of the One True God. Indeed, even now the word ‘Allah’ is used in most translations of the word ‘God’ in the Bible into Arabic. The Semitic roots of the word ‘Allah’ extend back thousands of years to the Canaanite ‘Elat’, Hebrew ‘El’ and ‘Elohim’ and Aramaic ‘Alaha’. We need to remember that the One True God is not Muslim, Jewish or Christian, but the One whom we belong to and who belongs to us all, even though we may have very many different understandings of the One.

Jesus appreciated God was bigger than his religion, and worked in the lives of people of other religions – like Naaman the Syrian, who was healed of leprosy, when many Jews weren’t. (Luke 4.16-30) Jesus appreciated people of other religions could not only have great faith, but also have greater faith than many people of his own religion – like the Syrophoenician Woman, whose feisty faith he was confronted with. (Mark 7:24-30) And Jesus appreciated people of other religions could be better examples of true religion than even the leaders of his own religion – like the ‘Good Samaritan’ whom they despised. (Luke 10.29-37) Unlike many Christians, Jesus could truly honour the ‘good’ in other religions.

We say Jesus is the ‘Way’. And the way Jesus related as a Jew to Samaritans, particularly the woman at the well (Jn:4:4-42) is the ‘Way’ people of different religions, like Christians and Muslims, should relate to each other. We should:
A. Recognise how much we owe to Jews who came before us. (Jn.4:22)
B. Acknowledge particularities – distinct rituals of worship (Jn.4;19-21)
C. Affirm universalities – all true believers worship in truth (Jn.4:23)
D. Never denigrate others – ‘don’t call down fire’ on them (Lk.9:54-5)
E. Take a conciliatory approach – ‘if not against you, for you’ (Lk.9:50)
F. Always accept hospitality – share food and drink together (Jn.4:7)
G. Practice respectful dialogue – explore the significance of Isa/Jesus as the Masih/Messiah – but not expect others to change their religion (Jn.4)