Fr. Thomas Michel's Official Website

There is probably no topic that has been more strongly discussed and debated between Christians and Muslims over the centuries than that of the Christian belief in God’s Triune nature or, as it has been called, the Trinity. Christians and Muslims both have written volumes on the side and neither has succeeded in convincing the other of their view. I do not hope to change that today. I am not going to try to convince you that the Christian position on the Trinity is correct, or that it is a better explanation of monotheism than what Muslims hold. Rather, I will try to explain what Christians believe about the nature of the one and only God whom we believe to be the Creator and final goal of this universe. You are invited to reflect and decide where you feel are the strengths as well as the weaknesses of this point of view.

Some of the questions I will try to address are the following: Can one say that if Muslims understood properly the Christian doctrine of the Trinitarian God that they would find nothing incompatible with true monotheism? Does the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition formed by that revelation treat orthodox Christian belief in the Trinity, or rather does the Qur’an condemn a deformed or heretical form of Christian teaching? Can the Arab Christian theological tradition, developed in the context of an ongoing debate and dialogue with Muslims, be a corrective to European/Western theological formulations which evolved in a cultural context in which Islamic objections need not be taken into consideration? And - what is the perhaps the most difficult question - has the defensive attitude adopted by Christians in dialogue of trying to convince Muslims that they really believe in one God rather than three prevented them from challenging Muslims to show how, without adopting a Trinitarian view of God, God’s activity in human history and in the universe can be adequately affirmed? In other words, should Christian Trinitarian belief be considered the radicalization of monotheism?

One and the same God?

It might be worth prefacing our reflections on such questions with a more basic one, but one which is still sometimes raised.  Do Muslims and Christians believe in the same God?  From a Christian point of view, does the Islamic denial of the Trinity result in such a fundamentally contradictory understanding of God’s nature that Muslims cannot be considered as worshiping the same God as Christians?  Conversely, Muslims might ask themselves, does Christian Trinitarian doctrine remove Christians from the family of monotheist believers?  Another way to ask this is: “Is Allah worshiped by Muslims the same deity as God worshiped by Christians?”

The idea that the terms God and Allah refer to distinct and rival divinities is not new.  Giuseppe Verdi’s 1843 lyric opera I Lombardi alla prima crociata reflects the popular European perception of his time in the Crusader chorus “Stolto Allah, sovra il capo ti piomba / Già dell’ira promessa la piena” (O foolish Allah, upon your head will crash / the fullness of promised wrath.)  It is clear that the author regards Allah as a rival deity to the God professed by Christians.

On the other hand, the theological tradition in Arabic, both Muslim and Christian, has never raised the issue of distinct divinities.  Even in the polemical writings on both sides, it is always presumed that Allah is the common name for the One God worshiped by both communities but concerning whom they have points of disagreement.

The question continues to have practical implications.  Some Christians refused to accept the Pope’s invitation to take part in the Days of Prayer for Peace in Assisi in 1986, 1991, and 2002 because they denied that Jews, Muslims and, a fortiori, followers of other religions would be praying to the same God.  On the other side, some Muslims in Malaysia pressured the government to ban the use of the term Allah by Christians in the national language because they rejected the idea that Christians were praying to the same God as the One revealed in the Qur’an.

Among Roman Catholic Christians, the issue would seem to have been settled by the declaration of the Second Vatican Council that “They [Muslims] worship with us the One God” (Lumen Gentium, 1).  Lest any doubt remain, Pope John Paul II has repeatedly stressed that Muslims and Christians believe in and worship one and the same God.  Among the many examples which could be given, three must suffice.  In his address to Muslims in Morocco in 1985, he stated: “We [Christians and Muslims] both believe in one God, the only God, who is all justice and all mercy.”  In the same year, in Rome, he stated to a visiting Muslim delegation: “Your God and ours is one and the same, and we are brothers and sisters in the faith of Abraham.”  Referring to Muslims in a May, 1999, catechesis he stated, “We believe in the same God, the one God, the living God, the God who created the world and brings his creatures to their perfection.”

As early as the 1970s, statements of the World Council of Churches, while not binding on member Churches, have made similar declarations.  For example, in a joint statement in Ghana in 1974, the Muslim and Christian international delegations affirmed: ABoth [Muslims and Christians], in their recognition and adoration of the One God, share a monotheistic tradition.”  Perhaps Kenneth Cragg, with his grammatical image, has stated the issue most clearly and succinctly: “When we [Christians and Muslims] refer to God, the subject is the same.  On the predicates we differ.”

For Christians, there is a deeper motivation than mere adherence to statements of their leaders why they must affirm the essential identity of the God of the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions.  It is the same God encountered by Moses, the God in whose name the prophets spoke, whom John the Baptist proclaimed, and whom Jesus taught his disciples to call Abba who is the one God worshiped by all three communities of believers.  Rejecting Allah of the Qur’an is tantamount to rejecting the consistent affirmation of the Hebrew Scriptures and the great figures of the Gospels.  What Christian would dare to claim that the God of the saints and prophets of the Old Testament or the God of John the Baptist, Mary, and other Gospel figures is not the God of Christians because their understanding lacked a specific Trinitarian content?

What kind of Christian belief is treated by the Qur’an?

Some Christians have claimed that the Islamic rejection of God’s Trinitarian nature is based on a misunderstanding of Christian doctrine.  Some go further to root this misconception in Qur’anic passages, an assertion which Muslims find offensive, as it implies either that Muhammad, rather than God, was the author of the Qur’ân or, what is even more blasphemous, that the Divine author of the Qur’ân was guilty of misunderstanding Christian teaching.  Of course, both suggestions are highly offensive to Muslims.

The Qur’anic passages which appear to reject the Trinity are not numerous but are emphatic in their rejection of trinitarian concepts.  Two passages, both taken from Surat al-Mâ’ida, are typical: “They disbelieve who say: ‘God is one of three’” (5: 77); and “Recall when God said, ‘O Jesus, son of Mary, was it you who said to the people: Take me and my mother as two gods apart from God?’ He replied: ‘Glory be to You! It is not for me to say what is not true. Had I said it, you would know it’” (5:116).  Such affirmations would seem to indicate an absolute incompatibility between Muslim and Christian understanding of the nature of God.

However, I see compatibility between these Qur’anic passages and the teaching of the Christian Churches.  What the Qur’an is rejecting is the same as what has been consistently denied by Christian theologians and councils.  For centuries, already before the time of Christ, the “Semitic triad,” as Trimingham refers to it, was evident in the religiosity of both nomadic tribesmen and settled populations of the Syro-Arabian region.  Although the names of the divinities changed from place to place, from tribe to tribe, in the centuries before and after Christian and before the time of Muhammad, there was widespread belief in the High God, called by some Arabs Allâh, that is, “the God” (al-Lah); his consort, sometimes called Allat “the Goddess” (al-Lat), and their son Ba’l (or Ba’l Shamim), that is, “the Lord.”  When some of these Arab tribesmen adopted Christianity, often with little instruction in sound Christian teaching, it was natural for the partially Christianized nomads, poorly schooled in their faith, to identify the persons of this traditional triad with God “the Father,” Mary “the Mother of God,” and their son Jesus “the Lord.”

It is this primitive, pseudo-Christian understanding, implying, as it does, the physical generation of Jesus from a type of sexual union of God with Mary, which is strongly rejected by the Qur’an.  The same concept has also been consistently rejected by Christian theologians, bishops, and church councils.  One could, in fact, find parallels in authoritative Christian sources, both before and after the time of Muhammad, to every Qur’anic condemnation of multiplicity and association in God.  Thus, the Qur’an can be read as rejecting these same unworthy understandings of God, proclaiming God to be far above such improper intermingling.  In effect, the Qur’anic statement and Christian pronouncements confirm the mutual condemnations of erroneous interpretations about God.

The Qur’an pronounces neither positively nor negatively on orthodox Christian trinitarian doctrine, because such was not encountered among the few semi-Christianized Arabs of the Hijaz region in which Mecca and Madina are located.  This argument of Trimingham’s is intriguing and somewhat convincing.  One could wish for more hard evidence that the Semitic triad was worshiped not only by settled populations but also by nomadic Arabs.  Moreover, most of the examples cited by Trimingham are taken from the northern reaches of the Arabian desert.  In any case, so little is known about the form or forms Christianity may have taken in 7th Century Hijâz or even whether Christianity in the Hijaz had progressed beyond the stage of isolated individuals who were attracted by or adopted some elements of Christian belief that it is difficult to move beyond conjecture and speculation.

Arab Trinitarian formulations

However, the view of some Christians that if Muslims correctly understood Christian Trinitarian belief, they would find nothing in it opposed to true monotheism is an assertion that requires closer examination.  The great Muslim polemicists, such as the Mu’tazili ‘Abd al-Jabbar and the Hanbali Ibn Taymiyya, did not reject the primitive understanding of nominally Christian Arab tribes, but rather the highly sophisticated Christian formulations of Baghdad, Rayy, Damascus and Constantinople.

The two factors which influenced and shaped the development of Arab Christian theology in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods were the internal controversies between Byzantine (called Melkite in Arab sources), Nestorian, and Jacobite proponents and the ongoing polemical debates with Muslim scholars.  As Muslims argued against proffered Christian formulations, the Christian arguments were revised and refined, inadequate terminology was replaced with new terms and concepts, and the debate resumed.  On their side, as Wolfson has shown, Muslims were engaged in a similar process and it was largely through the symbiotic interaction of Muslim and Christian Arab scholars that the terminology and conceptualization of Islamic and Christian kalâm evolved.

The early Christian Arab thinkers used terms borrowed from Greek to define Trinitarian concepts, such as the term uqnum, from the Greek γνωμη (intellect), to indicate the divine hypostases.  However, uqnum with its connotations of individuality referring to an autonomous subject of being and activity, was gradually replaced by the native Arabic sifah, meaning “attribute” or “characteristic.”  Surprisingly, the word sifah does not appear in the Qur’an, although the verbal forms of wasafa (to describe) are found.  However, the term was much used in Islamic kalam writings to indicate the specific attribute to which each divine name adhered.

Thus, the Arab Christian theological tradition developed in an intellectual context which contained two factors absent in the theological speculations produced in scholarly circles of Byzantine and Western Europe. Firstly, among Arab Christians, the Melkite theology which accepted the Trinitarian definitions of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon was but one of three vibrant currents of theology in competition for adherence by Christians.  In Baghdad, for example, Nestorian “low” Christology was more deeply rooted than the Byzantine, while in Egypt the monophysite or Jacobite “high” Christology was dominant.  This is in sharp contrast with the situation of Byzantine and Western European Christendom, where Nestorian and monophysite views were summarily dismissed as heretical.  The second factor is that Arab Christian theology developed in an environment where any conceptualization of the Trinity had to be tested, even as it was being formulated, by the way in which that formulation would necessarily be heard and perceived by the omnipresent Muslim.

This latter factor led all three competing Christian theologies to formulate their Trinitarian understanding in terms of sifât as the normal translation into Arabic of the hypostases defined by the early Councils of the Church.  The common Trinitarian understanding in Arab regions has always been that of “One God with three essential characteristics,” which produced an understanding significantly different in nuance from the Western tradition that translated hypostasis into Latin as persona and ultimately produced the novel concept in modern European languages of “Three persons in One God.”  The Latin persona underwent a considerable historical evolution in meaning from its original sense in theater indicating a “mask” or “role,” to its modern understanding as referring to “a being possessing independent consciousness and rationality.”  The Eastern theological tradition has generally rejected the Greek equivalent of “person,” προσωπον (prosôpon), in favor of υποστασις (hypostasis) in Trinitarian formulations.

Three persons in One God or One God in three modes of subsisting?

Karl Rahner, one of the few modern European theologians who has attempted to formulate Christian Trinitarian doctrine in full awareness of Islamic monotheist sensitivities, has noted that the terminology of “three persons in God” is, to say the least, “misleading and open to misunderstanding.”  Although one can find an orthodox explanation of the phrase by redefining “person” out of its normal usage, the modern Christian and non-Christian will almost inevitably think in terms of “three subjects differing from one another in their subjectivity, knowledge, and freedom, and wonder what kind of logic it is that permits three persons understood in this way to be simultaneously one and the same God.”  Just as in the 7th Century the Qur’an may well have been responding to something other than the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity, so Muslims of later centuries, in rejecting Christian Trinitarian doctrine may in fact be denying Christian propositions that do not express well the content of that doctrine. 

A more accurate statement of what Christian faith says of the Triune God can be achieved by use of the term hypostasis defined by the early Councils, which can perhaps best be translated as “mode (or manner) of subsisting,” which Rahner prefers, or “mode of being” as suggested by Karl Barth.  Speaking of the one God who subsists in three distinct modes is incidentally closer to the traditional Arab Christian formulation of one God with three essential characteristics or sifât.

An objection often raised against regarding the hypostases as “modes of subsistence” or “manners of subsisting” is that this is a reformulation of the modalist error of the 2nd Century condemned by the Council of Nicea.  However, at Nicea, the concept of modality as such was not condemned. What was rejected at Nicea was the view that the divine modes of being and acting were not part of God’s eternal nature, but rather ways of being which God adopted in time.  The hypostatic modes were extrinsic to God’s unchanging nature, historically conditioned accidents rather than pertaining to God’s essence.

The Council of Nicea affirmed the traditional belief that the Divine hypostases, or modes of God’s being and acting, were eternal rather than originating in time, real, rather than logical constructs, and essential, that is, pertaining by necessity to God’s essence and not extraneous characteristics added on to God’s nature.  Any modern modalistic formulation of the Trinity must remain faithful to the Conciliar understanding of One God whose three modes of subsistence are eternal, real, and essential to the Divine nature.

Mutual challenge of monotheist believers

We must proceed beyond the matter of adopting the most suitable terminology to the more difficult question of the way that monotheists must challenge one another on the implications of their commitment to worship the one God.  On the one hand, Muslims (and Jews) must continually ask Christians whether their profession of faith in the Triune God does not amount to a disguised tritheism, a doctrine of divine unity to which the believer gives lip service but cannot verify in personal religious experience.  To those for whom acknowledging the one God is not merely a metaphysical statement, but at the very heart of the believer’s faith, can Christians really consider themselves monotheists in more than theory?  While professing “I believe in One God,” must they not relate to God as though standing before a committee of three individuals?

On the other hand, the Christian must continually ask the Muslim (and the Jew) whether they need to go farther to achieve the kind of radical monotheism that Christians seek to profess in the doctrine of the Trinity.  Must not humans seek to conceive of God’s unity in a way that responds to the need to understand the ways in which this one, eternal, unchangeable, sovereign God is actively present in the material cosmos and in human history?

For all monotheist believers, questions regarding God’s oneness are not speculative ontological problems whose solution is to be sought in metaphysics, but rather efforts to know better this Living God who is continually creating, teaching, saving, and giving life.  Christians’ experience of the history of revelation and salvation is of a threefold nature.  It is an experience of the one God, who does not live and remain in a metaphysical remoteness, but continually seeks to impart God’s own self to created humans in truth and love as our own eternal life.  From a Christian point of view, it is not a question of God’s revealing something other than God, but rather God’s own self-revelation to humankind in both our historical contingency as well as at the transcendent core of our existence.  God’s historical self-revelation Christians find in the incarnation of God’s eternal message or Logos in the person of Jesus Christ. God’s active, transcendent presence at the heart, not only of human nature, but of the whole created universe, Christians call the Holy Spirit.

Trinity as radical tahwîd

If our concept of God is not that of the distant totally Other, but rather of God who has freely chosen to be part of contingent human history and who remains actively present at the innermost core of creation, it is not sufficient to speak of an eternal Message embodied in or mediated by a covenant, angel, or Sacred Book.  We must consider God’s active presence in terms of divine self-revelation: God’s self-revealing presence in the ever-changing events of human life and God’s transcendent self-revelation in every sub-atomic particle of the cosmos.  A radical monotheism, I suggest, requires that the one God have these two ways or modes of presence and activity in history and in creation and, moreover, that these modes be not created and not different from God.  For if we are speaking of a genuine self-communication of God to the creature, it follows that the very modes of communication must themselves be divine and not some created mediation.

For a believer who is content to worship and obey the incomprehensible God from an infinite distance, this discussion might appear irrelevant.  But if we admit the possibility that God might also be intimately near, and if we respond to a religious thirst for intimate communication with this radically present God, this would seem to imply that God has ways or modes, which are themselves divine, not created, and not separate from God, by which God enters definitively into human history and also remains as a life-giving presence at the transcendent core of the created universe.

Anything less would lead to the need for forms of created mediation (angels, emanations, avatars etc.) and unacknowledged polytheism.  In the Islamic tradition, cannot the Mu’tazili rejection of the eternal, uncreated nature of the Qur’an be seen as an effort to avoid an implied duality and to assert a more radical monotheism?

Does not the Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit as God’s own powerful, comforting presence in our midst correspond more to the Qur’anic concept of the uncreated sakîna than to the usual Muslim identification of the Spirit with the created Jibrîl (Gabriel), the angelic agent of revelation?  The Qur’an teaches: “It is He who sent down the sakîna in the hearts of the believers, in order that they might add faith to their (existing) faith”  (Qur’an 48: 4, Cf. also, Qur’an 48: 18, 48:4, 48:26, 2:248, 9:26, 9:40, 3:123.)  A Christian reader of these passages would spontaneously think of the Spirit.

For Christians, the Holy Spirit is not a creature, an angel, but one of the modes or ways of God’s own being and action.  In other words, God’s intimate, active presence in the created universe and God’s action of communicating His eternal Message to humankind through the prophets occurs not through some created mediation, but is done by and through God himself.

The key differences between the Christian and the Islamic perceptions of the Living God would seem to come down to two.  The first is the distinction between revelation and self-revelation, that is, between a God who reveals a Message and God who reveals God’s own living presence.  Islamic faith speaks of revelation, Christian faith of self-revelation.

Secondly, if one believes that God is radically present in human history and at the transcendent core of the universe, one is lead to ask how God is present.  Speaking of the “how” is to speak of modalities, the ways God actualizes this Divine presence.  Whereas Islamic faith, in my view, does not address the question of modality, Christian faith holds that God’s ways are two, God’s historical self-revelation in the human person of Jesus and God’s transcendent and active presence at the heart of creation, which we call the Spirit.  Thus the two divine processions and two missions of classical Trinitarian theology.

If Trinitarian belief is ultimately concerned with the ways or modalities by which God is present in transitory human history and in the cosmos, one might seek to explain the Christian belief in terms of Divine presence.  A modern Christian theologian in the Arab world has formulated Christian Trinitarian belief in just such terms, speaking of al-hadrât al-ilâhiyya, the Divine presences:  Allah hâdir la-na,” “God present for us,” whom we call Father, Allah hâdir ma’-na, “God present with us” in the incarnated Logos, Allah hâdir fi-na, “God present in us,” whom we call the Spirit.