By What Name Should We Call God?
The proper name to ascribe to the one Supreme Being has been a matter of contention among monotheistic groups for centuries. One Catholic bishop seeks to make it really simple; according to him, everyone should just call God Allah.
A Roman Catholic Bishop in the Netherlands has proposed people of all faiths refer to God as Allah to foster understanding, stoking an already heated debate on religious tolerance in a country with one million Muslims.
Bishop Tiny Muskens, from the southern diocese of Breda, told Dutch television on Monday that God did not mind what he was named and that in Indonesia, where Muskens spent eight years, priests used the word “Allah” while celebrating Mass.
“Allah is a very beautiful word for God. Shouldn’t we all say that from now on we will name God Allah? … What does God care what we call him? It is our problem.”
A survey in the Netherlands’ biggest-selling newspaper De Telegraaf on Wednesday found 92 percent of the more than 4,000 people polled disagreed with the bishop’s view, which also drew ridicule.
“Sure. Let’s call God Allah. Let’s then call a church a mosque and pray five times a day. Ramadan sounds like fun,” Welmoet Koppenhol wrote in a letter to the newspaper.
Gerrit de Fijter, chairman of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, told the paper he welcomed any attempt to “create more dialogue”, but added: “Calling God ‘Allah’ does no justice to Western identity. I see no benefit in it.”
A spokesman from the union of Moroccan mosques in Amsterdam said Muslims had not asked for such a gesture.
I have no problem with referring to God as Allah in principle. After all, the word simply means “God” in Arabic, and Christians who live in Arabic-speaking countries use that name just as Muslims do.
But the term does have a strong Islamic connotation since the majority of Arabic speakers are, in fact, Muslim, and the Qur’an and other holy texts of Islam were written in Arabic.
The AP article quoted above does not mention specifically why Muskens thinks that everyone should use the word Allah (other than it being “beautiful”), and I am curious as to why the bishop prefers the Arabic word over all other words for God in the world’s various languages. Arabic is only the fourth most spoken language; Mandarin, Spanish, and English are all more widely used. If one is looking for a universal word for God, why not choose from one of those languages?
My feeling is that Bishop Muskens’s choice of calling God Allah has a lot to do with its strong connection with Islam; I believe that he wants to use the same name for God that the vast majority of Muslims use in order to smooth tensions with the growing Muslim population in the Netherlands. While desiring to improve relations with the adherents of Islam is certainly admirable, I think that conforming our religious terms with those of Islam is an awful decision for three reasons.
One, it dilutes the uniqueness of Christianity. I really don’t want to get into whether or not Christians and Muslims worship the same God. I have my own thoughts on that, but they are somewhat irrelevant as far as this point is concerned. But even if one argued that the Allah of Islam is the same as the first Person of the Holy Trinity in the Christian faith, it goes without saying that Muslims do not recognize the divinity of Jesus or even acknowledge the existence of the Holy Spirit.
In Islam, there is only one god — Allah — and he neither begets nor is he begotten (strongly implying that there is no Trinity). In stark contrast, Christianity teaches that Jesus is the Son of the Living God, and only through Him can men be saved from their sins. I have heard liberal theologians attempt to make a case for Christianity and Islam being complementary religions, and I have the feeling that Bishop Muskens likely agrees with that notion, which is why he sees no problem with recommending a universal name for God which comes from the language of Muslims. But it were true that there are multiple paths to God — that both Christianity and Islam are equally valid — then the Christian faith holds no special significance, and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ was entirely in vain.
Two, making the concession of calling the God of the Bible Allah could very likely fuel religious extremism instead of squelching it. Though Muskens might think it is merely a symbolic gesture of good faith to the followers of Islam, it could easily be seen differently by practicing Muslims. According to Islam, there is no god but Allah, so for Christians around the world to call God by that name could be seen as a legitimization of the teachings of Islam.
But don’t expect Muslims to be grateful for this concession. Rather, it would demonstrate to hard-line Muslims, who perceive Christianity to be a corrupt religion, that Christians are far too weak-willed to stand firm for their own faith. Seeing Christians defer to Allah would be validation for fundamentalist Muslims that Islam is the one, true way and that they have the right to dominate people with other beliefs. Instead of uniting the followers of the two religions, I believe that sharing a common name for God could only lead to even greater hostilities, especially since from the Muslim perspective, Christian who worship and pray to Allah are no less “infidels” than they would be otherwise.
And third, expecting everyone to call God Allah may lessen people’s perception of His personal nature. One of the many wonderful things about the Lord is that He is not bound by any particular language, and each person can speak to Him in his own vernacular. But demanding that people refer to Him using a name which is only meaningful to speakers of a foreign tongue can make God Himself feel foreign and distant. That could potentially hinder people from experiencing God’s presence and growing closer to Him.
Tiny Muskens was right about one thing: God is not concerned with what we call Him. But instead of interpreting that to mean that we should all conform to calling Him by a single name, I think that each person should feel free to call God by whatever term that person finds to be most meaningful to him and which encourages him to develop a closer relationship with the Creator of the universe.
Whether we call Him God, Lord, Father, the Almighty, Jehovah, Yahweh, or even Allah is not the most important thing. What matters most is that we honor Him and obey His commandments.
Created at 11:08 PM
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