ROME — Pope Francis asserted this week Christians, Jews and Muslims, all worship the one God and are “brothers and sisters.”
“Jesus taught us to welcome one another as brothers and sisters,” the pontiff told a delegation from the Bologna Mosque in northern Italy. “And this is true first of all for us, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who worship the One God.”
Members of all three faiths refer to Abraham as “our father in faith,” he said, “albeit in different ways.”
“In today’s world, our witness of fraternity is indispensable and very precious,” he added.
Sincere and respectful dialogue between Christians and Muslims “is a duty for us who want to obey God’s will,” he contended.
Every believer “must feel free to propose – never impose! – his religion to other people, believers or not,” he said. “This excludes any form of proselytism, understood as exerting pressure or threats.”
In addition, “marriages between people of different religions should not be an opportunity to convert the spouse to his or her religion,” he declared.
The question of whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God has been hotly debated and is one of the “vexed” issues of interreligious dialogue.
Whereas Pope Francis has voiced his belief that the Christian God and Allah are the same God, other Christian leaders disagree.
Celebrated evangelical pastor Franklin Graham, for example, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, has insisted that Muslims and Christians “clearly” do not worship the same God.
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“Islam denies that God has a Son,” Graham wrote. “They deny that Jesus is God. They do not believe in a Triune God – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I can tell you – Islam and Christianity clearly do not worship the same God.”
Similarly, in 2007, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Vatican’s Doctrinal office, declared that Muslims and Christians “do not believe in the same God,” underscoring the differences in doctrine concerning who God is.
The former head of the Vatican’s highest court, Cardinal Raymond Burke, has also argued that Muslims and Christians do not worship the same God, since Allah is a “governor,” whereas Christianity was “founded on love.”
The modern belief that Islam and Christianity are fundamentally the same “is very much influenced by a relativism of a religious order,” the Cardinal said in 2016.
“I hear people saying to me, well, we’re all worshipping the same God. We all believe in love. But I say stop a minute, and let’s examine carefully what Islam is, and what our Christian faith teaches us,” he said.
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“I don’t believe it’s true that we’re all worshipping the same God, because the God of Islam is a governor,” Burke said. “Sharia is their law, and that law, which comes from Allah, must dominate every man eventually.”
The cardinal said that unlike Christianity, sharia is “not a law that’s founded on love. To say that we all believe in love is simply not correct.”
Not only do Christianity and Islam differ in the nature of their laws, Burke proposed, but also in their approach to proselytism and winning over converts.
In the end, he said, we have to understand that “what they believe most deeply, that to which they ascribe in their hearts, demands that they govern the world.”
Burke went on to state that “what’s most important for us today is to understand Islam from its own documents and not to presume that we know already what we’re talking about.”
