One and the Same? Absolutely Not!

By: American Decency Staff

“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins recently raised many eyebrows when she made that statement, as well as pledging to wear a hijab, the headscarf worn by conservative Muslim women, as a celebration of Advent – the weeks anticipating the celebration of Christ’s birth.

Professor Hawkins was promptly put on administrative leave by Wheaton, “in order to give more time to explore theological implications of her recent public statements concerning Christianity and Islam.” Chaos then ensued as liberal news media around the nation pounced on a fresh opportunity to denounce a Christian institution as intolerant.

While I agree with the reason for Professor Hawkins’ publicity stunt – “I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity” – her execution is tragically misinformed.

It is of the utmost importance that Christians and the culture around us recognize that Allah and Yahweh are not the same God.There is a reason that Jews and Christians share a common scripture, albeit an incomplete one in the case of the Jews, and Muslims alone hold aloft the Qur’an – the claims set forth by each are often contradictory.

Before we go into specific contradictions, let’s establish this: Muslims understand the Qur’an to be the direct revelation of their perfect, inerrant god just as Christians believe the Bible to be the direct revelation of our perfect, inerrant God. If we are both worshipping the same perfect, inerrant God who by definition does not make mistakes or contradict Himself, the scriptures of Islam and Christianity must be completely and entirely consistent. A perfect, inerrant God cannot disagree with Himself.

Having established any contradictions between the Qur’an and the Bible, identifying the deity described in each as being one and the same would be insulting to both. If we insist they are the same in spite of the inconsistency, by necessity, neither one is perfect or infallible.

To paraphrase Steve Coughlin from our last summer conference, “you can believe in one, you can believe in the other, you can believe in neither, but you cannot believe in both.”

I’m not by any means an expert on Islam, but even for the layman inconsistencies are not hard to find. The obvious expressions of religion aside – dietary restrictions, holidays, and yes, sometimes terrorism – Allah and Yahweh demand to be worshipped in different ways. The good Muslim must face Mecca in prayer so many times a day. No such demand exists for Christians. The good Christian partakes in the Lord’s Supper and, to my knowledge, no such demand exists for the Muslim, etc.

Even more foundationally, Christianity has no foundation without the Deity of Christ, yet the idea of Christ being God is anathema to Muslims and is, in their understanding, idolatry. In fact, the Qur’an vehemently denies this, the founding doctrine of Christianity: “People of the Book, do not go to excess in your religion, and do not say anything about God except the truth: the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was nothing more than a messenger of God…” (Sura 4) and again in Sura 23, “No son did Allah beget, nor is there any god along with Him…”

Surely if one God wrote one book to the Muslims and one to the Christians He would at least describe Himself in the same way.

As I said above, Muslims deserve dignity as humans and Image bearers of God, but Professor Hawkins’ expression of solidarity was a poor choice.

By claiming Christianity, Larycia Hawkins is making claims that no Muslim can agree with and still remain a Muslim. Yet, by wearing a distinctively Muslim headscarf, she is donning a marker that identifies her as Muslim or, “not Christian.” Surely there is a way to affirm the human dignity of Muslims without denying the uniqueness of the two largest and ever-at-conflict religions in the world! Or, to be more blunt, surely a Christian professor can affirm the human dignity of Muslims without affirming their worship of a false God.

And let us take that as an abrupt segue to another problem with Hawkins’ expression of solidarity – what does it say to the Middle Eastern Christians who are facing massive human rights violations at the hands of Muslims every day.

Dr. James Hoffmeier, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, lived in Egypt for over 20 years.

When the Wheaton controversy broke out, he asked some of his Middle Eastern Christian contacts for their take on it.

All their answers were compelling, but this from an Egyptian anthropologist especially struck bone.

“If [Hawkins] is concerned about the cause of the oppressed, there are many Christian and non-Christian organizations she can join that are really bringing change to people’s lives. Many such organizations are working with Middle Eastern refugees at different campsites. Our focus should be on such groups—Yazidis, Christians, Alawites, and moderate Muslims—who are experiencing genocide. My wife went to a refugee camp in Jordan this past summer to serve these groups who are literally stripped of their dignity. . . . Egyptian and Middle Eastern Christians have their own concerns and hardships. This type of gesture [wearing a hijab] is viewed as a form of empty propaganda; we call it shi‘arat in Egypt.”

More than any bigotry, real or imagined, towards Muslims in the United States, Christians are facing genocide at the hands of Islamists today.

In an piece poignantly titled, “And then there were none,” The Economist reports on the forced Christian exodus from the Middle East, “Overall, the proportion of Middle Easterners who are Christian has dropped from 14% in 1910 to 4% today. Church leaders and pundits have begun to ask whether Christianity will vanish from the Middle East, its cradle, after 2,000 years.”

This is a crisis. It is these Christians who truly need the expression of solidarity from Professor Hawkins, yet these spiritual brothers and sisters have been passed over for the worshippers of a false God who get sideways glances when they wear a funny hat on the bus.

Yes, Muslims are people too, Professor Hawkins. Yes, they are made in the image of God and should enjoy the same human rights that other people do, but Muslims are not being systematically removed from their homeland and mistreated because of their religion. Christians are. How about we take off that headscarf and hold up a cross and stand in solidarity with them.

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