Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God?

With Passover, Holy Week, and Ramadan all overlapping this year, the question may arise: “Do we worship the same God?” Indeed, just over a decade ago I was part of a panel discussion convened by Yale Divinity School which put precisely that question to us. While I tried to do my best on that occasion, I’ll confess I was quite uneasy about the question, but I had not yet arrived at the answer that I would now give. I cannot ask “Do we worship the same God?”, because “the same” is a measure and who are we to measure God?

Does this mean that I now believe we worship a different God? No, because “difference” is also a measure and, as I said, who are we to measure God? As a human being, a child of Adam and Eve, it would make me very happy to believe that we all worship the same God perhaps in different ways. But I am a rabbinic Jew: a Jew trained in the traditions of the ancient rabbis who reinterpreted the written Torah after Rome destroyed our temple and scattered us away from its precincts. The rabbis taught the surviving Jews how to read and reinterpret the written Torah after this destruction, and their work remains the library of what we call Judaism ever since.

So, as a rabbinic Jew, I do not receive the Torah as a commandment for all peoples on earth. It is a commandment for this people who, this week, retell the story of their escape from slavery in ancient Egypt and their receiving the Torah dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Does that mean that the Jews alone receive the word of God? No, I believe that what the rabbis call the “children of Noah” — each and every people on earth — receive commanding words from that One to whom they pray. Inspired by the prophet Amos, the rabbis expect that each people will do well if it follows these commanding words and will not do well if it does not. As for the words commanded to my people, I assume they are a blessing for any who might study them, but I do not presume that they supersede the good words commanded to other people.

More than that, I do not learn from the Torah how each other people lives its life, how it prays, how it obeys its commands. Ours, you know, is not a missionary people who presumes to tell all other peoples how they should live.

My people are scattered among so many nations, where many of us learn the ways and languages of our neighbours and fellow citizens. In my case, I grew up the only Jew in my grade school and may be one of two in the high school. I lived primarily among Protestants. As a student of anthropology and philosophy, I later studied among several other peoples as well, and sought to gain familiarity with their wisdoms and faiths. I sought to do the same among my own people, whose traditions I knew but deeply learned only during and after college. I became a student of rabbinic tradition, seeking to be rooted in my people’s Torah, and then became a student of Jewish philosophy, seeking to reason more broadly about the relation of this people and traditions to other peoples and traditions. I did not seek to become “other”, but to engage deeply with others.

Which brings me back to the salient question: “Do we worship the same God?” I wondered about that for many years, but I gradually learned not to ask the question because it cannot be answered in the terms it offers. The question is asked in everyday terms, where “same” and “different” are measures we might apply to piles of apples and oranges. But these are not terms of worship, and they cannot by any means be applied to our relations to the One to whom we pray. To explain my current approach to this question, I would draw on the following four sources.

Scripture

For this exercise then I will focus on the “Children of Abraham,” postponing words on other religions for another time. The narratives of ancient Israel, as displayed in Tanakh, in the New Testament, and in the Qur’ān, extend many narratives and terms of the religion of ancient Israel. There is therefore strong narrative warrant for speaking of the Abrahamic religions (including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as sharing parts of a frame for characterising God’s actions as, for example, creating the universe, revealing commands, teaching ultimate wisdom, fully redeeming us in the time to come, and the source of our being, knowledge, and peace.

There are also narrative grounds for distinguishing different spheres of God’s activity as known in these different traditions. But there are, at the same time, strong narrative warrants for identifying different, and at times seemingly mutually exclusive, sub-communities within these traditions, making competing claims about the divine identities even within these traditions.

Jewish philosophy

Perhaps the most significant Jewish philosophic element is the rabbinic distinction between the plain sense (peshat) and interpreted sense (derash) of the Torah. For the Talmudic authors, peshat does not mean “the literal sense”. Peshat means the sense or place of verses in their somewhat broader literary context, such as the meaning of “earth” within the specific plot of Genesis 1. As opposed to literal sense, however, peshat does not include the objective reference of such a term — in this case, what we may imagine “earth” means as some physical a part of the universe wholly independent of the biblical narrative.

I would say, perhaps more starkly, that the peshat refers only to a verse’s internal sense in the flow of a narrative — by itself, it has no determined meaning for us. I believe that, for the rabbinic sages, such meaning is to be found only in some level of interpretive meaning, displayed through the interpreting community’s lived relationship to the verse and to the broader scriptural literature.

In the most general sense, derash refers to any level of interpretive meaning of this kind. I think this is a powerful distinction because it means that God speaks to us by way of the material language (in this sense, “the alphabet”) of peshat, but only as enacted in the actual speech of those who in some time and place hear the scriptural word as commanding this or that action and revealing this or that truth.

In these terms, what do we mean when we name or characterise the one whom we worship? Our utterance has to display a literary sense in itself — it has to have a plain sense — but what is its interpreted meaning? If we maintain this distinction between sense and meaning, then our discussions about “the same God” will achieve a new form. When one refers to “God”, does that mean one is referring to some single object “out there”? Or is one invoking an infinite set about which one cannot measure sameness or difference? Or is one invoking that One who, however infinite and inscrutable, addresses those who, through prayer, binds the seeker to this One who also seeks?

I do not believe these questions are unanswerable — whether wrapped in infinite mystery or disbarred by some logical rule — but I do believe the answers will be nuanced and have multiple levels.

To say that “I worship God” is at the very least to say that I count myself as having some manner of intimate relation with God – or, as I prefer to say, with God’s actions. Can I talk about the intimate relations I have with friends? Yes, but I would not presume to “capture” those relationships through simple characterisations — as if to say that I could fully describe my wife in a word or even in a very long string of sentences.

I would not rely merely on utterances as a means of sharing with someone else any significant aspects of my intimate relation with God’s actions. Nor would I be silent or give up on communication. Instead, I would first acknowledge that my relation to God is articulated through patterns of action, cognition, feeling, expectation, and interrelation (the list continues indefinitely) and that I discern in these patterns a more precise register of my knowledge of the actions of God than I can articulate — at least, outside of my worshiping community — in the sentences of any natural language.

To share what I know with someone else, I must therefore enter into a relationship with this person that will, like any other relationship, begin in time, develop slowly, move, change, grow deeper. Within the complex life of that relationship, my conversation partner and I could share familiarity with certain patterns of life and thought, and I could then speak of aspects of my knowledge of God by pointing to, commenting on, or drawing analogies with these patterns. Over time, we two may develop a linguistic shorthand for the ways we tend to refer to these patterns. Within the limits of our constructed vocabularies and shorthand, we may, only then, begin to share some of our knowledge of divine things.

I think this is one of the profound dimensions of Jewish belief and ontology. It is signalled in the famous dicta of Jewish sages, classic and modern: the words of the rabbinic sage Hillel, “If I am not for myself who will be for me, But if I am for myself alone, what am I?”; the words of Martin Buber, “In the beginning was relation”; and Emmanuel Lévinas’s references to “proximity” and to the “face of the other”.

As for our present conversation about “the same God”, I believe this Jewish wisdom leads to the following recommendation: If a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew wants to discuss whether “a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew” does or does not worship the same God, the “Muslim, Christian, or Jewish” conversation partners will first have to enter into significant relations, one with the other with the other.

Only by way of a three-part relationship of this kind can meaningful and verifiable claims be offered about the relationship between the One to whom I worship and to whom you worship and to whom you worship. By the standard of Jewish wisdom I have just invoked, this relationship will have to begin somewhere in time and it will take some time to develop, evolve, change, and move until a response to our question can begin.

“Scriptural Reasoning”

There are many ways that Muslims, Jews, and Christians may interact with one another so that, over time, they could share conditions for articulating significant characteristics of the One to whom they each pray. “Scriptural Reasoning” represents one practice of this kind. Nurtured since 1994 by a society of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars, it is a practice of shared scriptural study. The rules of practice are simple:

• Join a small fellowship of study;
• Meet regularly;
• Focus group study on small excerpts from the three Abrahamic scriptures;
• Spending hours on short selections so that there is time for the texts to become windows to each other and to the heart-knowledge-minds of all participants;
• Study as if all participants shared in each scriptural tradition (in the sense of being invited equally to read, question, and explore possible meanings of each word and verse);
• Privilege no individual person or tradition’s voice or authority.

The “reasoning” aspect of Scriptural Reasoning is what may happen over time as trajectories of discussion and interpretation emerge that do not appear to belong specifically to any one text tradition.

Scriptural Reasoning would, I believe, offer an optimal context for conversing about each tradition’s relation to “the same God (or not)”. This study would not teach participants the identities of the one whom other traditions worship. Over time, Scriptural Reasoning study should — in grace — nurture the depth of inter-personal and thus inter-traditional relations that are appropriate to hearing and seeing meaningful aspects of the relations that trace each participant’s “knowledge” of the One to whom they pray.

Prayer

At this time in theo-history, I pray that Muslims, Christians, and Jews see each other’s prayers as blessings. And I offer this prayer only in the fullness of my life with God, among the people Israel. Within the terms of these reflections, “the fullness of my life” is represented by my capacity, in grace, to engage in deep friendship and shared study with my Abrahamic neighbours.

The integrity of my participation in such study depends on my integrating my tradition’s practices of study with a new, disciplined, practice of occasional, inter-traditional, theological study. To achieve this integrity, I have “work” to do — but, in the end, I can only pray that the work is met by the work of others and by divine favour.

In closing, let me introduce some of the beliefs that I believe I bring to such a discussion — beliefs that would be articulated appropriately only over time, within the context of an extended fellowship of study:

• I am open to the possibility that other peoples and other individuals may worship in an idolatrous fashion and, thus, worship someone whose commands may subvert the good commands each of us receives in our several Abrahamic traditions.
• I would not, however, make judgments about others’ worship until I had extended contact with them. My own tradition cannot teach me, a priori, how they worship, to whom, and for what. I must learn this through interaction.
• Other peoples may profess knowledge of “God” but display something else. Or they may profess knowledge of some god I do not recognise, but their manner of worship and life may suggest to me an unexpected relation to the God I know.
• Other Jews, for that matter, may profess doctrinally rabbinic belief in God, but until I enter relationship with them and see how they eat, sleep, and pray, I would not be able to comment on the object and nature of their worship.
• I want to enter this discussion within the parameters set by traditional rabbinic doctrine. But I discover that, on this question, there are rabbinic sources for both affirming and denying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, creator of heaven and earth. As a consequence, I read rabbinic doctrine as sending me out to look and see and hear about the practices of this or that Christian and this or that Muslim before I would be able offer a reasonable judgment about whose worship may or may not complement my worship.

I pray as a Jew, and I pray that the God I care for takes good care of you. It is Ramadan and you pray as a Muslim; may God bless you. Soon it will be Easter and you will pray as a Christian; may God bless you.

Peter Ochs is the Edgar M. Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Religion without Violence: The Practice and Philosophy of Scriptural Reasoning and Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews, and the editor of The Return to Scripture in Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation.