A Christian response to Muslims

Allah and the Trinity

by Miroslav Volf
IN THE FALL OF 2008,1 got a chance to ask one
of the Muslim world's most prominent clerics. Sheikh Habib
Ali al-Jifri, founder and director of the Tabah Foundation, a
question of great interest to me. "Do you think that Muslims
and Christians worship the same God?" Sheikh al-Jifri
answered without hesitation: "Yes, they do. In the Qur'a n it is
written: 'Our God and your God is One.'"
"But Christians believe that God is the Holy Trinity, and
Muslims disagree. How do you then still affirm that the two
worship the same God?" I pressed him.
He smiled enigmatically and said, "What the archbishop of
Canterbury wrote about the Trinity in his response to the
'Common Word' was very helpful."
Only a few months previously. Archbishop of Canterbury
Rowan Williams had res ponded to "A Common Word
Between Us and You," an open letter sent by 138 MusUm
scholars to Pope Benedict XVI and Protestant leaders. In a let-
ter titled "A Common Word for the Common Good," the arch-
bishop had written, referring to God the Father, the Son and
the Holy Spirit, that "God exists in a threefold pattern of inter-
dependent action." But Christians, he insisted, uncompromis-
ingly affirm that "there is only one divine nature and reality."
"The archbishop is a great and creative theologian," I
responded to Sheikh al-Jifri, "but he said nothing new in his
comments on God as the Holy Trinity."
"Yes?" he inquired. There was a note of mild surprise and
curiosity in his voice. In his lecture at Yale University some six
months earlier. Sheikh al-Jifri had stressed that Muslims "do
not believe that God mighty and majestic is Hecan be
divided." He implied, of course, that Christians do. I wanted to
reassure him that Christians and Muslims agree on this point.
"After the early centuries of intense debates, Christians
have come to affirm what some theologians have described as
'the numerical identity of the divine substance,'" I continued,
knowing well that the phrase is inexact, but wishing to under-
score an important point. "For us, the divine 'three' are one sin-
gle and undivided divine essence, not three divine essences
next to each other comprising some kind of divine troika."
I could not read his expression, but I sensed gravity in his
manner as he slowly turned to face me. "Miroslav," he asked,
"do you have time after the dinner to discuss this matter with
me and my collaborators at the Tabah Foundation?" An
immensely learned scholar of Islam and a spiritually attuned
man, he knew that we had touched the heart of the matter. Was
a way opening up toward convergence about one of the main
issues dividing Muslims and Christians?
The oneness of God (tawhid) is the principle at the very heart
of Islam. This is the central issue for Muslims disputing Christian
claims about God. The reason is simple: if the Father, Son and
Holy Spirit cannot be understood as one, according to Muslim
interpretations of God's unity, then Muslims and Christians do
not worship the same God. With the word God they may be
referring, in a general way, to the same divine reality one enti-
ty, which is not the world but which created the world but they
would not be worshiping the same God. Christians would be
worshiping three gods or, at best, one true God and two idols in
addition to God. This would be what Muslims call shirk, the
unforgivable, blasphemous sin of associating other beings with
Many Muslims suspect
that Christians are not
really monotheists.
God. Let's look more closely at this Muslim unease about the
Trinity and use it as an occasion to elucidate how Christians
understand God's trinitarian nature.
M
any sophisticated Muslim religious scholars, even
those who are familiar with Christianity and friendly
to Christians, suspect that Christians aren't true
monotheists. Christians affirm one God, while at the same time
insisting that there are three divine persons, each worthy of wor-
ship. Consider the Athanasian Creed, one of the most robust
Christian statements about God as the Holy Trinity, approved by
the great majority of Christian churches and read in many con-
gregations in public worship on Trinity Sunday. At the very
beginning it states plainly: "We worship one God." But it does
not leave it at that. The full first line of the creed's section about
God reads: "We worship one God in Trinity and the Trinity in
unity, neither blending the persons nor dividing the essence."
Miroslav Volf teaches at Yale Divinity School. This article is adapted from his
book Allah: A Christian Res pons e, just published by HarperCollins.
Used by permission.
Christian Century March 8,2011 20
Who are the persons whom Christians ought not blend?
They are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And how are they
related? The "person of the Father is a distinct person, the per-
son of the Son is another, and that of the Holy Spirit still anoth-
er." Each of the three is uncreated, each immeasurable, each
eternal, each almighty; in a word, "each is God." Does the creed
speak of three gods then? It does not. Clearly and repeatedly it
states what Christians have affirmed throughout the ages:
There are not three eternal beings, there is but one eternal
being: so too there are not three uncreated or immeasurable
beings; there is but one uncreated and immeasurable being.
. . . There are not three almighty beings; there is but one
almighty being And there are not three gods; there is but
one God.
So the creed says two things at once: "each is God" and
"there is but one God."To a Muslim (or Jewish) ear this sounds
like asserting that there are in fact three gods but calling them
one. Except for the opening assertion, "We worship one God,"
it would seem, to quote Aref Nayed, director of Kalam
Research and Media in Dubai, that a Muslim "cannot accept
and must actually reject the entire Creed."
Just why must a Muslim reject what the Athanasian Creed
says about God? The creed, the response goes, seems incom-
patible with the central Muslim claim that there is "no god but
God." Moreover, the Qur'an seems to condemn directly the
kinds of beliefs the creed advocates. Consider the following
texts from the Our'an:
1 ) "They say: 'God hath begotten a son.' Glory be to Him
to Him belongs all that is in the heavens and on earth: every-
thing renders worship to Him. To Him is due the primal origin.
Of the heavens and the earth: When He decreeth a matter. He
saith to it: 'Be,' and it is" {Al Baqarah, 2:116-117).
2) "Say: 'O People of the Book! Come to common terms as
between us and you: that we worship none but God: that we
associate no partners with him; that we erect not, from among
ourselves. Lords and patrons other than God.' If then they turn
back, say ye: 'Bear witness that we (at least) are Muslims (bow-
ing to God's Will)'" (al 'Imran, 3:64).
3) "They do blaspheme who say: God is one of three in a
Trinity: for there is no god except One God. If they desist not
from their word [of blasphemy], verily a grievous penalty will
befall the blasphemers among them" (al Ma'idah. 5:73).
4) "They do blaspheme who say: 'God is Christ the son of
Mary.' But said Christ: 'O Children of Israel! Worship God, my
Lord and your Lord: Whoever joins other gods with God, God
will forbid him the garden, and the Fire will be his abode.
TTiere will for the wrongdoers be no one to help" (al Ma'idah,
5:72).
5) "They take their priests and their anchorites to be their
lords in derogation of God, and [they take as their Lord] Christ
the son of Mary: yet they were commanded to worship but One
God: there is no god but He. Praise and glory to Him. [Far is
He] from having the partners they associate with Him" (al
Tawbah,93l).
So let's take up the central claims of the Our'anic passages
above and see how each relaies to what C iiristiaiiitys creeds
and great teachers mean when they speak about the trinitarian
nature of God.
1) Objection: The God who creates the heavens and the
earth by the power of the Word cannot be said to have begot-
ten a son or anyone who is strictly like God.
Response: The issue here is the meaning of the word begot-
ten, not the substance of our understanding of God. Christians
do not think of "begetting," when applied to God, as a physical
act between male and female divinity. Speaking for the whole of
the Christian tradition, Gregory of Nyssa, one of the most
prominent of the Eastern church fathers, wrote: "The divine is
neither male nor female (for how could such a thing be contem-
plated in divinity)?" Moreover, "begetting" in God does not
result in an offspring spatially distinct or in any way independ-
ent from God, a godlike being or another God. Begetting or etet-
nal generation, as the technical term goes, is a metaphor used to
express the idea that the Word, which was from eternity with
God, is neither a creature nor some sort of lesser divinity, but is
the very uncreated God. The exact point of using the term begot-
ten is to distinguish the generation of the Son from an act of cre-
ation"begotten, not made," as the Nicene Creed affirmsto
insist that the eternal Word or Son is not a being next to God but
is of one essence with God.
2) Objection: God cannot have an associate joined to God,
any equal or lesser divinity next to God.
Response: Exactly right. When Christians speak of "Father,
Son and Holy Spirit," writes Archbishop Williams, summariz-
ing traditional Christian convictions, they "do not mean one
God with two beings alongside him." There are not three
divine beings but one divine being"the Living and Self-sub-
sistent, associated with no other."
3) Objection: God is not one of three divine beings in the
Trinity.
Response: Again, exactly right. When Christians speak of
the three in God, they do not mean "three gods of limited
power," writes the archbishop. The Athanasian Creed puts the
21 Christian Century March 8,2011
same point this way: the divine essence is "not divided." To
divide the divine essence in any way is to slip into polytheism,
which Christians reject.
4) Objection: God cannot be "Christ, the son of Mary,"
because then God would be a creature, in need of food and
shelter, not the sovereign creator of heaven and earth, beyond
all needs.
Response: Christians generally do not say that God was
Christ; I know of no significant classical theologian who makes
that claim. Instead, Christians say that "Christ was God"or,
to use New Testament phrases, that "God was in Christ" (see 2
Cor. 5:19) or that the eternal "Word became flesh" (John 1:14).
The two claimsthat God was Christ, and Christ was Go d -
seem similar but are in fact very different. Christians believe
that Christ was fully human and therefore in need of food and
shelter, as well as fully divine and therefore of one undivided
essence with God.
5) Objection: Christians worship persons they associate
with God in denigration of the one true God.
Response: Christians agree that anyone who worships a human
being does so in denigration of God; that person is an idolater.
Christians reject worship of Christ or anyone else in place of
God, In worshiping Christ, whom they consider to be fully divine,
they are worshiping the one and undivided divine essence.
From the Christian perspective, affirming the existence of
multiple self-subsisting divine essences is polytheismand
"pure unbelief." That is why the Athanasian Creed unambigu-
ously and repeatedly states that "dividing the divine essence" is
unacceptable. A basic rule for Christians as they speak about
God is this: "Never divide divine essence." It is not allowed to
break this rule when talking about God as the Holy Trinity. A
positive way to make the same point would be to say that
Christians affirm "numerical identity of the divine essence." This
is the phrase I used in my conversation with Sheikh al-Jifri, and
he immediately recognized it as addressing the crux of the ten-
sion between Christian and Muslim conceptions of God's unity.
A Muslim critic might well cry out, "False victory! The
agreement you have sketched about God's unity is nothing but
mere words. Just listen to the way you talk about how God acts
in the world, and the agreement will disappear like dense fog
under the sun's warm rays. If you claim that the 'Son' was
incarnate but the 'Father' was not, have you not in fact divided
the Trinity?
"At best you are confused: you say you reject dividing the
divine essence, but you actually divide it by your belief that
Christ was both God and man. You are simultaneously saying
two contradictory things, namely, that the divine essence is
undivided and that the divine persons are distinct. At worst,
you are disingenuous: to soothe your guilty monotheistic con-
science (or maybe even to mislead Muslims and Jews), you put
up a good front by insisting that God's essence cannot be divid-
ed. But behind the scenes, you actually believe in three gods.
Come clean! Either give up on God's
unity or reject the Trinity. You can't have
it both ways."
Clearly, it is one thing to reject division
of the divine essence and another thing to
actually avoid dividing it (just as it is one
thing to condemn sin and another thing
not to commit it). So how do Christians
keep the divine essence undivided? In
addition to stating clearly that there is
only one numerically identical divine
essence, they note that the persons are
tied and intertwined together in a most
intimate manner, more intimate than any
relation between creatures could ever be.
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lhere are two related ways to think
about this intimate connection
between the divine three who are
indivisibly one. First, when God acts
"toward the outside"creating, redeem-
ing, and bringing the world to comple-
tionGod's acts are undivided, insepara-
ble. Every act of one person of the Trinity
is always caused by all three. If this were
not the case, then, as Augustine put it,
"the Father [would do] some things, the
Son others and the Holy Spirit yet oth-
ers." And this would be utterly unaccept-
able, he explicitly states. It would verge
on polytheism.
Christian Century March 8,2011 22
The second way the divine persons are tied together is their
mutual indwelling or, in technical terminology, perichoresis.
Again, as Augustine put it, "they are always in each other" and
never "alone." One divine person is what it is, not simply in
virtue of being distinct from others but in virtue of the pres-
ence of the other two persons in it. Tlie Father and the Spirit
are always "in" the Son; to be the Son is to be indwelled by the
Father and the Spirit. Two consequences follow;
1 ) In terms of the identity of divine persons, you cannot sim-
ply say; "to be one is not to be the other" as you can say of crea-
The Qur'an's obj e c t i ons do
not a d d r e s s normative
Christian b e l i e f s about God.
tures, including human beings. When it comes to God, "not to
be the same" does not mean "to be other," and "to be other"
does not mean "not to be the same," as Nicholas of Cusa has
rightly noted.
2) In terms of the activity of divine persons, you cannot say
that the act of one is the act of that person alone, as you must say
of human beings. When it comes to God, in the act of one per-
son, all three always act because they are always "in" that per-
son. When human beings act together they join forces, each act-
ing separately toward the common goal (as when three persons
are pushing a car). It is different with God. The three divine per-
sons never need to join forces, because when one acts, the other
two are in that person and act through it.
For the great medieval Muslim commentator Fakhr al-Din
al-Razi, the proof that Christians putatively "affirm one [divine]
essence" but in reality posit three divine essences is that "they
deem it possible for these essences to inhere in the person of
Jesus and of Mary." In his view, if Christians truly considered
the divine essence to be indivisible, then it could not be that one
person, the Word, would have become incarnate in Jesus Christ,
but rather all three would have become incarnate. To have the
incarnation of just one of the persons, argues al-Razi, you need
more than one divine essence. Incarnation is therefore an
irrefutable proof of Christian polytheism.
Is his argument valid? Not if we affirm that the three divine
persons mutually indwell each other or that God's acts toward
all that is outside God are undivided. These affirmations resolve
the problem of dividing the divine essence. For it is not that one
divine person inheres in Jesus while the other two continue to
inhere in God. Rather, the one God, in the person of the Word,
becomes incarnate. According to John's Gospel, "the Word
became flesh," the Word that is, which both "was God" and was
"with God" (John l;l-2,14) . And yet it was not the Word alone
that dwelled in Jesus. Using metaphorical terminology of
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Christian Century March 8,2011
fatherhood and sonship, Jesus claims in John's Gospel: "The
Father is in me and I am in the Father" (John 10:38). The same
is true of the Spirit, who is said to "remain on" (Uke a "descend-
ed dove"), and therefore act in and through, the Incarnate One
(see John 1:33-34). Though only one person is incarnate, all
three persons are present and act in that one person who
became incarnate. This is the consequence of saying that the
persons of the Trinity "mutually indwell" one another. Thus the
incarnation doesn't require any division of God's essence.
A Muslim critic might respond: "Those are just the kinds of
difficulties you get yourself into when you affirm the Trinity;
then you have to use words like begetting. Son or person, but
can't use them properly like everybody else does."
But now it may be my turn to suggest that this would be a false
victory. For our difficulties in speaking of God would not go away
if God were not the Holy Trinity. Ail words we use of God are inad-
equate. Why? Augustine explains: "Because the total transcen-
dence of the godhead quite surpasses the capacity of ordinary
speech." The words paint a picture or tell a story, so to speak, but
the picture or the story is always more dissimilar than it is similar
to who God truly is. God is uncreated and infinite, therefore inex-
pressible and beyond our concepts, beyond our language.
The talk of persons captures something about God but is
inadequate to express the full reahty because God transcends
the notion of person. The same is true of essence, goodness,
love all to varying degrees correct and true as referring to
God, but all also deeply inadequate. The very reality of God is
such that God always remains inconceivable, a mystery that
can never be properly named or puzzled out. And yet we speak
of God, guided by God's self-revelation. We have true knowl-
edge of God, but we are capable of understanding much better
what that Mystery is not than what it is. Important strands in
all three Abrahamic faiths agree on this.
I hope that these arguments will be plausible to Muslims and
Christians alike. With regard to Muslims, however, my purpose is
not to persuade them that God indeed is the Holy Trinity. I have
not offered a single argument in favor of this cardinal Christian
belief My purpose is more modest: to demonstrate that the rejec-
tions of the Trinity in the Our'an do not refer to normative
Christian understanding of God's threeness, and that the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity does not call into question God's
oneness as expressed in Muslims' most basic belief that there is
"no god but God." What the Our'an may be targeting are mis-
conceptions about God's nature held by misguided Christians.
This discussion has been directed not primarily to Muslims
but to Christians. My goal is to remind Christians that Muslim
objections to the doctrine of the Trinity and the uncompromis-
ing affirmation of God's oneness from which these objections
stem are not in themselves good enough reasons for Christians
to think that they have a radically different understanding of
God than Muslims. Unity of God doesn't separate Muslims
from Christians; it binds them together. 9
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