Do Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Mormons and Protestants worship the same God or not?

They all claim that they worship the Creator God and that there is one Creator God but they ascribe different characteristics to this God. Even different names. The Islamic faith is like Mormonism for the seventh century, while Joseph Smith wanted to make a religion based around a biblical topic based on phoney texts that made the Americans the chosen people, Mohammed did that for the Arabs. While Smith was not much of a one for leading people into battle he did make a lot of parallels with Mohammed, including the multiple wives thing.  In the case of Mormonism you have texts which are supposed to have been written in a language called Reformed Egyptian, although nobody can see this language and Joseph Smith is supposed to have had something called the Urim and Thummim (a Biblical idea but we’re not sure what they are) to interpret this text, and the original is in golden plates given by the angel Moroni which nobody else was allowed to look at. They ask anyone willing to talk to them to pray and ask God whether these things are true,  but when I did so the answer that came to my head was that whenever before God has spoken, he has protected the language of these revelations so that Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek are still spoken or understood at least almost natively today in the face of overwhelming enemies and opposition. Even the Qur’an was in a language kept until today but in their case, they were the overwhelming proposition, so to speak, so I am not counting that.

Muslims

The Muslims claimed that Moses and others were all good Muslims but others had twisted their words and only the Qur’an (plus the Hadith and Sunna, as in fact you don’t get most of the doctrines in practice from the Quran alone) is a copy of the Umm al Kutub or Mother of all Books (if I got that bit of Arabic wrong excuse my memory) and is a copy of the Book which is with Allah in heaven. On the one hand they say that these texts are a revelation for the Arabs and have to be kept in Arabic, but on the other if taken all together you see they contain an expansionist statecraft which adds up to a political exceptionalism for Muslims, and especially for Arab Muslims. Unlike the Bible or other texts for that matter, the holy texts make demands on Muslims which basically prove it was intended initially only for one time and place. The Feast of Ramadan can’t be kept in the polar regions as you would never get to your iftar for half the times Ramadan is kept.  The Hajj can only be kept physically by a tiny proportion of Muslims if you look at the logistics, whereas the religion says every Muslim is supposed to do it at least once in their lives. I will leave you to to your own maths and if you can see a way to actually enable this to happen, by all means use the comment section. I don’t censor for disagreement as long as it is civilised and not spammy or vulgar or satanic.

Jews

Jews have developed their views in a rather complex way, adding layers of complexity with each additional text so that in essence you have a Talmud sitting there much much bigger than the Old Testament and taking certain ideas from Torah and Tanakh in very different directions than the New Testament takes them, but still they seem rather a lot closer to Christianity than Islam in that they do at least have three quarters of the same Bible as we do, pages wise, anyway.  And there are many flavours of Judaism so that in a sense talking generally about Judaism is nearly as prone to be misleading as talking in generic terms about Christianity. There are Jews on both sides of very big fences both in politics and in ethics, as well as in questions of our origins in Creation and our destiny in the afterlife. There’s nothing new in this really – Pharisees and Sadducees as well as other sects of Judaism where in deep disagreement about some of the most fundamental questions even at the time of the New Testament, as can be seen from the life of Jesus as well as the Acts of the Apostles and some of Paul’s letters, among others.

Christians differ from most Jews over the person of Jesus Christ and the authority of the New Testament. We believe in the Trinitarian formula which makes Jesus absolutely unique and the Bridge between God and Man. Son of God and Son of Man are titles used of Him almost interchangeably. John 17 shows an amazing secret about who Jesus is and who He is also before He was born of Mary.  Jews have not accepted this in the main however there have always been some who have indeed accepted this and come to know Jesus in a Christian way. There are then two opinions on whether they are still Jews if they do. Many will say that they are not, but others will say they are except only in the sense that Talmudic Judaism has gone its own way and defines Judaism around itself, whereas in fact there are many ways of being a Jew, and always have been, at least for a couple of thousand years at any rate.

Roman Catholics

Roman Catholicism is one of the Christian churches, but has the problem that it holds particularly closely to ecclesiastical traditions and structures and derives as much authority from them as from the apostolic writings to the extent that they consider themselves to be in a straight line from the apostles and that the protestants have gone off at a tangent. The fact that they still have larger numbers than the rest seems to confirm them in this view, despite Jesus’ warning that it isn’t about numbers. Protestants however see themselves as having abandoned a lot of medieval entropy and gone back to the very text of the New Testament. Along with this, we focus back on the central role of Jesus in saving us and applying this salvation to us via faith.  Apostolic succession seems to Protestants to be a self-serving doctrine wrung from a handful of verses by those who would be served by thinking thus. And in practice, when  we consider via what kinds of people this line of succession has gone and how many of them put carnal, earthly considerations before those of God’s kingdom, the doctrine seems to ring very hollow indeed.

Roman Catholicism uses certain terms in quite different ways to the way Protestants use them, for example they use the term “sacraments” to cover quite a lot of things while for us there are only two: baptism and the lord’s supper. They say that the lord’s supper, which they call the Eucharist, is a “means of grace”, a term also used by Protestants but with the meaning of praying and reading the Bible. They think that the bread and wine turn literally into the body and blood of Jesus but as a Passover meal, but what these things do is show that Christ is the Passover, it was because of Him being that Lamb that would take away the sin of the world that in the first Passover the blood on the lintel and the lamb eaten by all who were to be saved turned away the avenging angel and got them through the Red Sea which fell on their pursuing enemies. The Passover Lambs did not need to turn into the blood and body of the the future Messiah for this purpose but it got them through the Red Sea.

Protestants

And then within Protestantism also we have various disagreements as to who should be baptised, how often the Lord’s supper should be taken, predestination versus a total volitional approach, as if these were contradictory, which in fact they are not (unless you have the mind of a child who also cannot understand how Quantum mechanics can be true and Newton’s or Einstein’s physics also true) and questions of Church governance, end-times prophesies and worship styles.

Same name, different God

So in a sense we have the same God but at the point at which we ascribe to God varying characteristics and varying expectations from us, in a sense we have a different God. Just as Paul warned the Galatians against accepting “another Jesus”. He didn’t mean a different person coming along claiming to be Jesus (the NT warns about that also, in other places, but this isn’t what Paul has in mind when talking to the Galatians) but another view of what Jesus did and what it meant, and how to apply it for our salvation. It was tantamount to having another Jesus and thereby, another God.

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Question received: “He could always get off his butt and put in a public appearance. He’s been on a long holiday it seems: the Bible is full of burning bushes, visiting angels, miracles etc and for the last 2000 years or so…. Crickets. Just radio silence.”

The Bible also talks about lengthy periods when God was not speaking to Israel. This occurred during the time of the Judges and in the run-up to Samuel, for one, but there are numerous further examples.

In fact the Bible talks about a series of interventions whereby at critical times God showed Himself, but even when you talk about burning bushes and visiting angels, very often these were to very limited numbers of people who believed already, so they were not to make unbelievers believe.

The accounts of them are what are supposed to make unbelievers believe. If you perform a miracle in front of someone, in lab conditions so to speak, then their acceptance of it has nothing to do with belief, it is a proven fact. It is knowledge.

We’re not saved by knowledge, we’re saved by belief. This is intrinsic to the Christian message. If it were not so, then either we would be showing you God or we ourselves would have to abandon Him. But the point is that salvation is through faith and you can only actually have faith through “hearing” (which includes reading, but at any rate a second-hand account).

Those who believe already may receive or may not receive first-hand knowledge of God. They may receive healings and see things which are unlikely to pass as mere coincidences. Their accounts in turn may be believed or not by other people.

That’s how it works.

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The Testaments (TV Tie-in): A Novel
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Response to Ian’s challenge: “The accounts of these things happening to Jesus are no more than copycat stories of mythological prior accounts found in Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, Babylonian and Mesopotamian sources.”

“On the other hand there is more than adequate evidence from pre-Christian religions of exactly the same things that supposedly happened to Jesus. Scourging, whipping, suffering and crucifixion feature in these pre-Christian religions.

Conclusion: the accounts of these things happening to Jesus are no more than copycat stories of mythological prior accounts found in Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, Babylonian and Mesopotamian sources.

Of course, in that case, the gospels’ accounts are also mythological, not real historical ones which were completely misunderstood and misrepresented by the early Roman church. Another one of their historical blunders. Think about that this Easter.”

  • Ian on Quora

Introduction

What you are describing is no problem to Christian theology, Ian, and I would like you to read from my message to you now exactly how we account for these things, as of course it is a perfectly reasonable point, but thankfully one we have a very satisfactory answer to. I say “satisfactory”, meaning that those who want to believe will be satisfied by it, and those who want to disbelieve, well, they’ll obviously find holes to pick in it. I ask you to try to be open-minded.

The idea of “typology” in Christian apologetics

Here goes. We include in our theology something called typology. We see so-called “types” of Christ in the Old Testament. Jesus Himself gives an example of one when he tells us the brazen serpent in the wilderness was Him. In another case he states that Jonah prefigures Him, His use of Psalms indicate that in many respoects the life and sayings of David prefigure Him.  Look and Live: Christ as the True Bronze Serpent will give you more on that, including the scriptural references, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typology_(theology) contains more information from a not specifically Christian viewpoint about this idea in Christian theology. It’s an important idea and until you get to grips with it, you haven’t done justice to the claims of our faith on your heart.

We see clear types of Christ in numerous pagan religions, and if Christ demonstrates Himslein a brazen serpent then He can also be represented in a number of pre-Christian religions. What we notice is that that around the world as missions went into the field, they found many Christ figures, sons of God, who died for us, various sacrificial animals especially lambs, When they realised that these were forfigurings of the person and work of Jesus as shown in the New Testament, they readily exchanged their former belief systems for these. Nobody believes right now in Hercules or Osiris or various Norse deities that claimed to be sons of Gods.

The God who winks?

In Acts 17 we see from verse 15 onwards an account of St Paul’s arrival in Athen’s and his sermon to the Athenians from Mars’ Hill. He told them that their altar to the Unknown God wasn’t a different God that they worshipped, but the true God, only worshipped ignorantly. Today we might make the same Pauline comment to Muslims who state that the 100th Name of God is unknown to men. The Bahai’s already tried to claim this but we know that it is of course Jesus. The summary to Mankind of all that God is, in very human flesh.

I recommend you to read the whole passage but in particular please note these verses:

v30 And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:

v31 Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

 

We see God being willing to “wink” or overlook ignorance, but now a day is appointed for the judgement of the workld, and we know from Jesus’ own lips that this day will only come when every tribe and nation has heard the true gospel of His sacrifice on our behalf, and each nation which has never heard the gospel is no longer limited to the hints of the way of salvation that the human conscience and the types scattered across the world’s native cultures can have given them.

Once we have properly heard the Gospel, there is no more excuse for ignorance, there is no more winking by God, no more “hyperidōn” as the Greek puts it, no more overlooking the fact that an idol was worshipped and instead gracious imputation of the worship of Christ as it was with the bronze serpent in the wilderness.  We now have the full Acts 4;12 scenario: “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” than solely in the name of Jesus Christ.

They want to place Christ in a no-win situation

But we are left between a rock and a hard place with atheists. When they hear that we preach those without Jesus are going to hell, they say “how unfair on those who lived in the past before the gospel reached them or before Jesus lived”. But when we show the myriad of these types of Christ, these brazen serpents, to whom the elect persons of all ages could look and live as they were deemed to be reacting toe the Gospel, had they encountered it, then atheists say “you see, there’s nothing original about Christ, all He is is a hodgepodge of pre-Christian religions!”.

Please give this your heartfelt consideration.

I want you to be ready

There are wars increasing around us, new plagues, famine is coming, awful plans by people whom we are paying taxes to be trustworthy, yet they merely work out the agenda of the demons who possess them, often fully convinced they are doing humanity a great service, and completely unaware of the lethal tools of Satan that they are. If I did no know that Jesus is victor, I would be walking around with a cold feeling of fear in the pit of my stomach, a feeling many know today and need to know that Jesus is the answer.

Sooner than we know, history comes to a conclusion, Jesus returns in glory and power. As He does so, there are all over the world groups of people working in offices and factories together, or asleep in the same houses – one is taken, others are left, to their destruction and endless regret. They see Him, but the age of grace is over. The call to repentance and faith which we proclaim today then no longer maintains its validity. This age is soon gone, whether by your own death or the end of the entire world, which rolls nearer and nearer with Newtonian acceleration.

I want you to be ready.

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Part of a discussion on whether we have free will in Heaven, and if not, is it a problem for theology.

Just as faith has significance in the life of a human where there is room for doubt, so what we would refer to as doing the will of God, or good works, has meaning only when there is a meaningful temptation to do the opposite.

These two things, faith and works, are placed on apposition if not outright opposition to each other in various passages of the New Tesstament, whether we are talking about Paul, James or the Lord Himself. Moreover much discussion of the faith Vs works dichotomy informs writing and philosophy throughout Church history, but I would invite you to consider that faith and works is all there is to behaviour in terms of seeking to please God, and then you can make a matrix of four windows with faith and works along the horizontal and doing God’s will Vs the credible or meaningful alternative to doing God’s will along the vertical, so that you get four panels, like the square window in CBeebies, with such labels as “doubt” “belief” “temptation” and “obedience”. Of course there is another set of windows you could add in showing what happens if you succumb, namely “unbelief” and “disobedience”.

Here’s a version I made including the third way of pleasing God, ie He decides to set His love on us, this is seen as the real deciding factor by Calvinists but in any event this we cannot change, we influence the criteria on the two more left columns but in fact those who are not in the elect will never want to do so. The fact that you want to do so means you are most likely in the elect, so it is not something you should use as a barrier to God.


Having set up this image, I would like to suggest that before we are in Heaven we are afflicted by these alternatives and can therefore fall into the lower categories of unbelief and disobedience despite having chosen not to do so. It is the result of what theologists have described as the three-fold problem of the World, the Flesh and the Devil. I could enlarge on that if need be, but for economy I will not do so now. I will also skip over the issues of the New Heart, the Church and the Holy Spirit, which are the opposite three-fold chord. This we can discuss separately.

Once we have attained the end of the age, whether by our death and entering the next life, or because we are alive at His coming, we will be resurrected in a perfect and uncorrupted form so the flesh has not its old power over us. The world is passed away for us, we are entirely beyond the reach of societal pressure, and the Devil is entirely bound from us.

Faith is no longer actually a criterion for us, once we reach that point, as we know at that point.  “We shall know as we are known”. Faith as it is described by Jesus and also by the writer of Hebrews 11 is only possible to have while you don’t actually know, although some are confused on this point, and will state that they know when in fact they do still only believe, however there are some who have experienced enough to be able to know for sure that God exists and loves them, but this is not always as good as having faith in the face of doubt, as the risen Lord explained to Thomas.  This is why God severely limits His direct manifestations to people unless they are in fact already believers, and even for believers very sparingly, as He loves to see our faith. Moses saw God face to face but in the end never saw the promised land, while those who believed his reports without seeing did see the promised land.

Thomas was still saved because he was able to say “My Lord and my God”, whereas the Resurrection in itself was not empirical proof of the Deity of Christ in as much as there are those who assent to the Resurrection but do not know Jesus as their Lord and God. Had Thomas had no more confession than what he had seen empirically, I am persuaded that this would not have constituted saving faith and therefore the detail of his confession of our Lord’s deity is a vital inclusion in the holy text.


We therefore at that point of entering that next world which we call heaven, know God, we have a perfect physical reset and no reason nor pressure whatsoever to be distracted from doing the will of God and worshipping Him purely. But this is what we have chosen now, in this life, what we have asked Him for and what we now thirst for every day of our lives, whilst being too weak in the flesh to bring about what our Spirit is certainly willing.

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The Agroletnica site is practically ready

For those of you interested in the Agritourism ranch we have taken over and are now running near Zielona Góra, the new website for it is here.

 

We invite you to have a look, and also make a booking. The place offers you excellent value for money even without a discount, but for regular visitors to this website we can offer you 20% off the published prices, mainly because I would like to meet with many of you and interact in real life.

For polyglots or language students this would also be a great place to run immersion courses for three or four days.

For visitors from America, Japan, etc, who would like to see some major world cities in Europe, thos would be an ideal base from which to day-trip out to four major cities: Poznań, Berlin, Wroclaw and Dresden. Zielona Góra is a pleasant and historic city in its own right, and the countryside around Letnica is often viewed as the nicest in the country, with its rolling hills, clean rivers and lakes and seemingly interminable forest.

Zapraszamy!
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