Truth Unites - Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

Gavin Ortlund argues that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God because Christian worship is informed by the Incarnation and the Trinity. Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? This is a very practical question, not just for our relationship as Christians with our Muslim friends and neighbors, but also for relationships of different Christian traditions. Roman Catholics, for example, uphold the teaching of Vatican 2, which affirms that Muslims, along with us, adore the one and merciful God. Lately, there's been some discussion of whether some Eastern Orthodox patriarchs have said something similar or not. So these questions are floating around. What should we think about? this. As followers of Jesus, the first thing we want to say is that we're called to love our Muslim friends and neighbors, but love shouldn't prohibit accuracy about where we do have differences.

In fact, love requires us to be honest and open about the truth on such a foundational question. So in this video, I want to put forward an argument that, no, we do not worship the same God, Christians and Muslims. And the key will be defining this word worship. Now, let's start by saying there's a lot of common ground that we do have. We both profess monotheism, that's belief in one God, and our conception of this one God has a lot of points of overlap. There's historical overlap, tracing the roots back to Abraham, okay? And then there's conceptual overlap regarding God's unity, various divine attributes, like God's omnipotence, God is all powerful, God's role as creator. In my academic work on divine simplicity, I've benefited a lot from studying medieval Muslim

philosophers like Avicenna and others on divine simplicity. And we can learn from arguments for the existence of God that Muslims have developed, like the Kalam cosmological argument. So we're certainly not wanting to say that our views of God never touch or have no similarities and so on and so forth. But worship, strictly speaking, worship proper, refers to a covenantal activity of responding to God's self-revelation. And for Christians, that means that worship must be informed by two cardinal doctrines, the Trinity and the incarnation. The Trinity informs the object of our worship, and the incarnation informs the manner of our worship, how we approach God. Now, this does not mean you have to have perfect theology in order to truly worship God, but you can't reject these foundational

truths and still have a valid expression of worship to the true God. You know, it's like if you're playing golf, you don't have to have an eight iron and a four iron, but you have to have some clubs just to be able to hit the ball. And the incarnation and the Trinity are absolutely foundational. Let's break that down and explain that. We'll start with the incarnation, then we'll touch on the Trinity, and then we'll deal with three objections. Before you leave comments, just check in the timestamps if they're in the objection section so that you can know if, at least if you're going to object, you know, hear me out. So first, let's talk about the incarnation. This is the doctrine that the son of God, the second member of the godhead became man. So he is the godman. He is fully God and fully man. And the reason for this

event is our salvation. We needed a Savior who is a God man because as the God man, he can function as a mediator by which we can approach a holy God. The word mediator means a third party who facilitates a relationship between two other parties. And Paul says there's not only one God, but there's one mediator. to get to God, which you can see in purple on screen here from 1 Timothy 2. And the reason that the God man is the mediator is because if his atoning work on the cross, which you can see in red here, he gave himself as a ransom for all. So in this passage, Paul is moving from monotheism to atonement. One God, one mediator. They're both right there. Now, this is something that the scripture makes very clear is that the mediatorial role of Jesus is necessary for a proper

a relation to God, Jesus himself said whoever does not honor the son, does not honor the father who sent him. Or in John's letters, the Apostle John in 1 John 2.23 says no one who denies the son has the father. So we would say from the New Testament that there's no way to approach God and enter into a right relationship with him other than through this pathway that God has provided. It is through the God man, the mediator, that our worship of God becomes acceptable to him and we enter into a saving relationship with him. The way to the presence of God is through Jesus, just like the high priest had to go through the temple curtain. And that's why you'll find Jesus' death on the cross spoken of as a temple curtain there in Hebrews 10, which you can see. So then we say, okay, well, so all right, so there's a mediator.

We have to go through the mediator. Okay, so what does that mean for our worship? Well, it's important to recognize that not all worship of God is equally acceptable to him or equally valid in his eyes. The book of Hebrews would have no point in saying, let us offer acceptable worship, which it does in chapter 12, as you can see on screen, if there were no such thing as unacceptable worship. And throughout the Bible, you know, you'll find God throughout the Old Testament speaking through the prophet Hosea, essentially saying, I hate your worship and I do not accept it. That's because of just this horrific hypocrisy among the people of God at that time. In his own day, Paul says that some of his Jewish contemporaries have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

And so he's saying zeal is not enough if you don't submit to the righteousness of Christ here in Romans 10, 2 to 3. Or you think of Jesus' dialogue with the Samaritan woman, where he says those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. We'll come back to that passage more, but just to note for now, Spirit and truth refers to worship that's empowered by the Holy Spirit and grounded in the truth of God's self-revelation in Christ. So what we're trying to say right now very basically is just not all worship is valid and acceptable. In fact, even among those who have some kind of special revelation

from God. And so we want to ask, okay, how do we know which worship is valid in God's sight? And we can combine these two points that we've made so far and say there's a mediator, some worship is not valid. We can say one of the ways that you have to have, one of the things you have to have valid worship, but it's got to go through the mediator to be valid worship of God. Again, just think of these simple words from John here. No one who denies the son has the father. For a right relationship to God, we must approach him through the mediator, and that's the son of God incarnate Jesus Christ. Now, in a minute, I know this gets complicated. That's why I say, watch the objections before you leave comments if you're willing. I mean, it's fine if you don't, I don't get annoyed at that, but I'm just saying you might just hang in there a little bit,

because I'm going to get to this objection about what about those who are just ignorant of the Trinity or of Christ or have a partial or imperfect understanding of it? So we are going to address that, but right now, I just want to observe, I'm dealing, the passage in John there is dealing with a denial of Christ. I'll put this passage up a third time here with the verb in red font, and you can see, this is talking about someone who denies the sun, and unfortunately, Muslims do deny the incarnation of Christ as God in the flesh, they deny his crucifixion, as well as the doctrine of the Trinity is denied. You can see on screen one passage in the Quran that explicitly rejects both

the claim that Christ is God in the flesh, as well as the doctrine of the Trinity, as punishable errors. So we're not here dealing with ignorance with Islam. We are dealing with dealing with a rejection of these claims. Listen to how it's put by Pastor Thabidi Ani Bwile, who came to Christ from a Muslim background. What if though, as Dr. Wolf would argue, the Muslim understandings of the Trinity are not accurate and that if we just clarified our views of the Trinity, then Muslims would see it differently, that they're reacting to perversions of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity? I think that's partly true.

In my experience, in both the Muslim world and the Arab Muslim world and in the Western world in talking with Muslims, even when you clarify the many misconceptions about the Trinity, it is abhorrent to Islam that God should exist in three persons. It is, most Muslims will tell you that's illogical. And inevitably, what you're doing is committing the highest blasphemy of making partners with God. So it is true that there are misunderstandings for sure, but there's not, it's not just understandings, just misunderstandings. there is a rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity and also what we're talking about here,

the incarnation of the Son of God that is explicit in the Quran. And this is a problem because the scripture teaches that acceptable worship of God is through the mediator, through the God man, through the incarnate son of God and his death on the cross. And the New Testament is clear if you reject, if you deny Jesus, then you reject the Father as well. The second point would be the Trinity, and what I really want to belabor here is that the doctrine of the Trinity is not just one aspect of God. God simply is the Trinity. There is no other God who exists other than the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The begotten, the begetter, okay, let's go in order.

The beginner, the Father who begets, the Son who is begotten, and the Spirit who is spirated. that is ultimate reality from which all other things come. That is God. Okay. So if someone denies the Trinity, they're not merely misunderstanding a particular doctrine about God. They're actually misidentifying who is the God who is out there. We might, this is tricky because we'll get into some of the philosophy of reference here, because we might use the term God to refer to an entity that has some overlap. You know, we might say, use this term to refer to the creator, but we will mean radically different things about who that creator God is. So there's a general aiming in the right direction with respect to the reference of the term God here, but it breaks down once you get

to the point of something like worship. And we can just observe, you know, it's kind of like, say, put it like this. I was trying to think of metaphors. Think of the difference. of when you're looking from a distance at the broad outline of somebody's head and you get a sense of, okay, you know, with their proportions of their, but that's different from walking up to them and looking them in the face and seeing their eyes, right? Similarly, there's a general awareness of a creator God, but for worship of this God, at this point, you need to know who this God is, because the one you're actually worshiping simply is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now, again, let's acknowledge the complexity of this a little bit. There is a difference in sense versus reference. So you can use, there can be terms that have a different sense and yet the same referent. It's also true that you can have errors in your theology about God and still be worshipping the true God. Thank God. I mean, that's true for all of us to some degree, right? None of us have perfect theology. But the question is, are there any boundaries to that?

Can the errors become so egregious that actually you're just not worshipping the same entity anymore? For example, Mormons believe that God was once a man, native to another planet, who progressed to become divine. And I would say this leaves you with a totally different idea of just what divinity is. Because we have the same language, but we're just talking about something very different because you don't have a God who, at that point, you lose God's metaphysical ultimacy and self-sufficiency. and you just have a different entity that you mean by the term God at that point. And I'm, you know, I've done, been studying Mormonism a little bit more in the last few weeks,

and I do think this, that we are using similar terms, but we have fundamental differences in just how we define those terms. And so the question here in this video then is, what are the nature, what's the nature of the errors in Islam from a Christian standpoint? And do they rise to a similar level like that? Now, if you don't agree with me about Mormon there, you could think of another religion where you just think, you know, at a certain point, somebody could be worshipping God, but they could mean something so different by that. It could mean, you know, it could be a God who's completely impersonal. It could be a God who's not remotely omnipotent or ultimate.

So the point is we can all recognize there's some boundaries here. You can't just define God any way you want and still insist you're worshiping the true God. So the question is with Islam, right? Because Islam does have more overlap than something I would argue than something like, Mormonism. Forgive me if I'm not supposed to use the term Mormonism. The other terms are too long. But point is, because here with Islam, you do have a self-sufficient and transcendent creator, God, who is one God and so forth. Nonetheless, there are serious differences that do go down to the roots. Let me explain this with a metaphor. So imagine you have a neighbor named Bob.

Sorry, it's going to be dumb. It's going to be dumb. Bob is a doctor. Bob is very friendly. Bob is 5-2, and he's bald. Okay. Now, your other friend says, oh, I know Bob. I think I met him at a party one time. And you say, oh, really? Tell me what was he like? Because you're trying to engage. You really meet the same person. And your friend says, I didn't really like him. He was kind of standoffish. Now, at that point, you might start to be a little suspicious if this is the same person as your neighbor, because you've observed your neighbor to be friendly. And this person is saying they're standoffish. But that's the kind of error that is possible. You know, you know, friendliness is somewhat subjective for how you measure that. Maybe Bob

was having a bad night that night or something. So, you know, you're not going to draw any quick conclusions there. But if your friend says, oh, I know Bob, yeah, I met him at a dinner party, and you say, oh, what was, what was he like? And they say, yeah, he's six, eight. He is long, flowing blonde hair. He's a basketball player. He's not friendly at all. you're going to conclude that can't be my neighbor, that degree of error, that degree of difference is not plausible if it's in fact the same person. And what I want to put forward here is to emphasize and submit to you for you to consider all that really is at stake in the difference between a Trinitarian God and a Unitarian God, in that difference itself and then how it flows out into the rest of your doctrine of God. because these are not merely different instantiations of the same species, as though there's this generic reality called God, and then one instantiation of that is the Trinitarian God, and another is the

Unitarian God. These are just fundamentally different conceptions, because Christians believe there simply is no other thing that we call God other than the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Father who eternally begets, the Son who is eternally begotten, and the Spirit who is eternally spirated. If that is the actual God who is out there, then the rejection of those particular persons means you're not worshipping the actual God who is there. There's a more fundamental misidentification there is what I'm trying to say. And you can see that in looking at how the Trinity then flows out into all the other aspects of theology proper or the doctrine of God. So even looking at the attributes of God that are purportedly held in common by God in Islam and God in Christianity, God's love, for example, both Muslims and Christians will affirm God is loving, God is compassionate, lots of passages like this in both our sacred texts.

Nonetheless, if you start to, it's almost on anything, if you just start to unravel, you start to probe, you start to pull apart and look at it and sit with it for a while, you start to say these are actually very different conceptions, of the nature of divine love. Because for Christians, love is eternally shared between the members of the Godhead, for starters, but also love is at the core of God's identity. The Bible says God is love. Muslims emphasize and tease out the nature of God's love differently. They won't speak as quickly about God loving sinners, for example, sinful people, his enemies, you know, passages like Romans 5. If you just kind of sit with the Quran in the New Testament or take the whole of scripture, you're going to start to see a lot of creation, another example. We both believe in one creator God, but they create differently.

The motive is different. A Trinitarian God creates out of the overflow of love and generosity. There is a sense in which a unitarian God does not love another person until there is creation, and that really is a fundamental difference, I would argue. So the Trinitarian God of the Bible and the Islamic conception of God differ in nature. They differ in how similar attributes are instantiated and play out in real history. You almost might say these two deities differ in their personality, to put it like that, because they act so differently in history.

And here I think we do well to listen to the testimony of those who convert from Islam to Christianity, like the Christian apologist Nabil Qureshi, who said the difference between Allah He's talking about the God of Islam there with that term. The term that doesn't always refer to the God of Islam. But here in this context it is. The difference between Allah and the Christian God is not like a different name. It's like a different person. So while it's true, you can have theological errors and still worship the true God.

Those errors can get to a point where they impede genuine worship because you simply have a different entity altogether that is on the receiving end of this worship. It no longer is the God who actually is, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now, let me address some objections at this point, because I know some of the pushback that will come from that. First of all, let's talk about what about the Jewish people, you know? If we think of these three Abrahamic religions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, well, what does all of this mean for our Jewish friends and neighbors? And especially, what about the people of God throughout the Old Covenant, like Abraham and Moses

and David and so forth? And here I think we want to again highlight what I hope has come through already. I want to keep reiterating. This is a theme in this video, and there's a difference between lacking a full knowledge of the Trinity versus rejecting the Trinity. And what will come up here with the Jewish tradition is to consider what point of redemptive history we are at. Because we believe that the climactic moment of God's self-revelation came to Christ,

and that rejecting that revelation at that time in history and going forward leads to a fundamental change. And I would point to passages in the New Testament like the parable of the tenets in Matthew chapter 21 as an example of this where you find Jesus talking about the kingdom of God being taken away from the Jewish leadership. So the point here is there's a difference between rejecting the Trinity after God has made it clear and revealed it more fully versus not knowing the trinity. Trinity fully before God has made it clear. Those are very different. Ignorance prior to Revelation,

rejection after Revelation, two different things. Now, I want to say also that I think that the people under the Old Covenant, the Jewish people, were worshipping the Trinity and had a partial understanding of that. That's why you have passages like, you know, God's God in Psalm 45 and the Lord speaking to David's Lord in Psalm 110 and the, you know, the Lord sending the Lord, the angel of the Lord who is worshipped and things like this. I've built a fuller case for that. I talked about that in this video, for example. It's not, I want to be so clear though. I'm not saying they had a full understanding of the Trinity, but I would say it wasn't Unitarianism throughout the Old Covenant era. So it's false that modern day Jewish people who reject the Trinity and affirm a Unitarian

conception of God in some way or another, even if they don't use that terminology, they're not in the same position as the Jewish people prior to the coming of Christ. Second objection, it is true that all people have a knowledge of God from his general revelation and that sometimes people outside the scope of God's covenant work can be spoken of as worshiping God in some sense, almost a kind of worshiping God in ignorance. So let me explain this and work through this. We have some passages like this. Paul in Athens, for example, he's famous, you know, you've probably heard of this passage. He's preaching in Athens. I got to preach in Athens a year and a half ago, and I preached on this passage because I love this story. So one of my favorite passages in the Bible.

But he's talking about the people there who worship an unknown God. He says, what you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. And then the significant passage of Jesus in John 4 speaking to the Samaritan woman, you worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know for salvation is from the Jews. Now, the Samaritans would arguably have been a little closer to the Jews in Jesus' day than Muslims and Christians are today, at least in their conception of God. The Samaritans accepted only a part of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, and there were differences even there with that. And they rejected the temple worship in Jerusalem. They had real differences, I don't think they necessarily had a totally different conception of God or something, but the point for us is

simply this, for this video. Both Jesus and Paul are talking about what we can call a worship in ignorance here. And that's indicated by the words as unknown in Paul and the words, what you do not know in Christ's words. The object of worship in both of these instances is unknown. You know, think of prayers and and words of worship going up, and then there's clouds that eclipse so you don't see where they end up. You don't see the object of worship receiving these prayers and other acts of worship and so forth. You don't know. It's a God unknown. Okay, so this is not comparable to Muslims who reject the Trinity. Think of the Athenians that are listening to Paul. Okay, they had never heard of the Christian God and his revelation through Christ. This is the first time they're coming into contact with this, whereas Muslims do know

about Christ and unfortunately reject the Christian conception of Christ as the Godman, the doctrine of the Trinity, and so forth. So there's a fundamental difference there, and the same point would apply to God-fearers like Lydia and Cornelius in the Book of Acts, who respond to a fuller revelation when it does come. That puts you in a different position from those who reject that fuller revelation. Also, I think we need to point out that this kind of worship and ignorance is really a different kind of worship. In both passages, both John 4 and Acts 17, the whole point is to contrast the worship in ignorance from a worship in truth and to call people out of that into the worship in truth. You know, Paul's whole challenge is, so that's very different from saying, well, we worship the same

God, where the term worship isn't being used in two different senses. You know, you think of Jesus insisting that we must worship God in spirit and in truth, saying salvation is from the Jews. So Jesus really is making a contrast there as well as an acknowledgement of you worship what you don't know. He's contrasting these two different kinds of worship and saying, you need to come over to this kind because salvation is from the Jews. You must worship in spirit and truth. Similarly, Paul is calling people into a true worship there. So what we can observe is basically that the word worship is being used in two different senses here. There's this kind of worship and ignorance is using the word worship, but talking about something different than the way.

we typically use that word worship. We typically use that more in a covenantal context, in the context of salvation, where the entity being worshipped is known in a personal way, for example. And this is not the only term that can be used in two different ways like this. So you think of the language of knowing God. There's one sense in which those outside the covenant of relationship with God, that God's revelation to Israel and then into the church and so forth, that they do know God, because Paul says in Romans 121, they knew God. But Paul can also speak of those outside of God's revelation as those who don't know God. And so rather than saying Paul's contradicting himself, we can say the term no is not being used in the same way. There's a general knowledge of God

through general revelation, through conscience that makes you morally culpable. But then there's a covenantal knowing as well. And the word worship can be used in this very much more general, almost sort of ironic way. You worship what you don't even know, as opposed to being used in a more covenantal and salvific sense. And the problem here is that Luangentium at Vatican 2 seems to suggest a shared worship that implies some kind of salvific connection. And this goes beyond what scripture affirms about non-Trinitarian worship. Third objection is, well, what about church history? We do have some precedent in the Christian tradition for language about Christians and Muslims worshipping the one God in a various language like this. And here I would just urge

looking at these statements in context to see the other things that are also said that can flesh out what is really meant by that. Oftentimes the point will be to distinguish between monotheism and polytheism, but it won't be to affirm this as a valid worship. So John of Damascus, for example, speaks of the Ishmaelites who used to be idolatures, which some take to mean, oh, well, then these people that he's going to identify ultimately with followers of Muhammad do worship the true God, but at the same time, as you can see on screen, he calls this religion a forerunner of the Antichrist. And as you can see here on this new quote, just a few sentences later, he refers to Muhammad as a false prophet and his teachings as heresy and so forth. So it's misleading. If we pluck out why,

portion of this and leave off all this other language because it's not a valid or acceptable worship if it's coming from a false prophet constituting heresy and being a forerunner of the Antichrist and so forth. And you can find similar, John of Damascus is not unique in that kind of language. You can find Thomas Aquinas speaking like this as well, speaking very clearly about the level of error here. So what we want to be careful to do is draw from the historic language but see it in context and see all these other aspects, and not just pluck out one aspect from church history, but leave off all these other aspects about heresy, perversion, fabrication, the Antichrist, and so forth, because that's inconsistent.

So wrapping up, what do we do with all of this? Well, I think we would just need to observe that there are fundamental differences that Christians and Muslims do have about who God is, who is to be worshipped, and how we approach that God. Those differences go down to the roots. And the goal in highlighting that is not to in any way suppose that Christians are better than Muslims or something like that. Christians should never feel superior to anybody out of any religion because we believe in the God who had to die for us to be forgiven. So we're not saying this in the spirit of, you know, oh, we're right and we're better.

Rather, the goal is that we long for all people, including our Muslim friends, to worship the true God. And accuracy, you know, theological accuracy affects how we worship. Sometimes people want to pull these things apart and say, well, you can have theological errors but still worship the true God. That can, that's true. But the errors are going to affect how you worship, and they can grow to a point where they impede whether there is a valid worship happening at all. And the reason this matters is because we want people to worship the one God who actually

is, the Father who begets, the Son who is begot. and the spirit who is spirited.