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Excerpt from:
Lovat, T. & Fleming, D. (2014). What is this thing called theology? Considering the
spiritual in the public square (pp. 45-53). Macksville: David Barlow Publications.
CHAPTER FIVE
Abrahamic Theologies: Judaic, Christian, Islamic
Introduction
The religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are commonly referred to as the Abrahamic
religions because of the common link with the story of Abraham which can be found in all
three religious traditions (Peters, 2004; Lodahl, 2010). The sacred story that relates to
Abraham (Ibrahim to Muslims), Sarah, Hagar (Hajar to Muslims), Isaac, Ishmael (Ishma’il to
Muslims), is shared by these three religions and, in each case, is part of the foundations of
each of the religions. While one could be forgiven for not noticing it, granted world events
now and for the past 1000 years, these three religions actually have much in common and
every reason for intense understanding of each other. Their common heritage is in the story
of the ‘wanderer’, Abraham, to whom a promise was made by a ‘new’ god, a single, universal
and all creative God, that this God would be the god of the people that Abraham would gather
as a ‘new nation’, a special people who would live according to God’s ordinance rather than
under human ordinance. For the Jews, the ordinance is in the ‘Torah’ (incorporating the ‘Ten
Commandments’), for Christians in the ‘Great Commandment’ and for Muslims in the ‘Five
Pillars’, each slightly different but essentially driving at the same set of beliefs, duties
regarding worship and their related ethics. God is above all other gods and hence is to be
worshipped exclusively and those who worship this God must live out the practical ethics
outlined in the relevant ordinance above. Each of the ordinances shows that these practical
ethics centre on personal and communal moral action.
In the Ten Commandments, the early ones concern matters of core belief (eg. ‘I am the Lord
thy God and thou shalt not have strange gods before me’), worship (eg. ‘Remember thou
keep holy the Sabbath Day’) and the actions focus on the ways in which anyone who claims
to be one of God’s special people must behave (eg. ‘Thou shalt not steal’). In the Great
Commandment, the core belief and implications for worship are in the first tenet (‘Love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind and self’) and the single action that follows is ‘And
love thy neighbour as thyself’. In the Five Pillars, the core belief is in the first pillar,
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essentially the opening passage of the Qur’an (in part ‘Praise be to Allah, Lord of the World,
the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy, the Master of the Day of Judgment’), the duty to
worship in the pillars is concerned with daily prayer and making the Haj (pilgrimage to
Mecca) and the necessary practical action is in the pillars concerned with fasting and the
giving of alms (the mandatory tithe or tax so that no-one in the community is left in want).
So, the Abrahamic religions have much in common, regardless of their obvious differences.
The central point of commonality is in their core theology, their belief in a certain kind of
God, a single, all creative and all powerful God who is in relationship with His People. The
commonality between the three religions has been likened to a large old tree with two huge
branches. The two branches are Christianity and Islam, while the trunk of the tree, that which
has given life to and sustains the two branches, is Judaism.
Judaism
Judaism is an unusual religion for one that has been so influential (Avery-Peck & Neusner,
2001). It is quite small in number and always has been. It has never desired to spread by
proselytising or conversion; in fact, it is quite exclusive in wanting to keep to itself and being
highly demanding on anyone who wishes to convert to it. So, unlike Christianity and Islam,
its branches, it has never engaged in missionary activity and the numbers demonstrate that
this is the case. Unlike both its branches whose numbers each exceed one billion followers,
Judaism has scarcely more than 20 million or so followers. So why has it been so influential?
Judaism’s influence is arguably in its conception of God. Among the religions that had
preceded it, religions typical of the features of primal religions that we saw before, gods and
spirits were plentiful. Typically, every aspect of life had a god attached to it. There were
gods in all the natural features of life, whether geographical (eg. the mountain god), climatic
(eg. the storm god) or seasonal (eg. the god of the harvest). These gods were to be taken
seriously and appeased where necessary but they were normally not in relationship with
humans. Note in the earlier chapter that there were exceptions to this generalisation and the
likelihood is strong that the primal religions that preceded Judaism actually had some of these
all-powerful high gods, yet more humanised and relational ones.
Nonetheless, it is central to the beliefs of Judaism that the God the Jews came to understand
as their God was distinctive as being a single, all powerful (omnipotent) God who had created
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all things and sustains all things according to his will. In this regard, Jewish theology of God
is of a High God, in the ultimate sense. At the same time, this High God is one who relates to
his people, potentially to all people but central to Jewish theology is the belief that the Jews
are his special people through an exclusive relationship of the High God’s choosing. In spite
of this God being the creator of all things and, in that sense, capable of being Lord of the
whole world, this God selected the Jews to be his Chosen People. This God is therefore cast
as a ‘jealous’ one, who makes heavy demands of loyalty on his people but, at the same time,
protects them against the ambitions of all other peoples. Significantly, the loyalty of God’s
chosen people to their relationship takes the form of both piety towards God and also ethical
relations with one’s neighbours, including both those within the Jewish tradition and those
outside of it. Such theology is expressed throughout the Jewish Scriptures (more commonly
known by Christians as the Old Testament), including especially in the prophetic books and
the psalms.
This central theology about God explains why the Jewish religion has never grown to be
large like others. It is an exclusive religion, highly selective and self-protective. Everything
that Judaism has been to the world, and continues to be today in its strengths and challenges,
is explained by its theology. Without understanding this theology, there is no understanding
of the Jews, a mistake that many people, politicians, media and educators, have made in their
estimations and postulations about the Jews and the issues pertaining to them.
It is worth noting at this stage that there are many different interpretations of Judaism,
including within Judaism, and most especially about the controversial nature of what it really
means to be ‘chosen’. For some, it is an offensive notion, including among many Jews
themselves that the Creator of the entire world and all people would ‘choose’ one people over
another. It has also been the cause of much hostility and violence, most especially aimed at
the Jews themselves. So, chosen-ness needs to be carefully defined and understood. While
some Jews are happy to take it at face value and declare, in imperious fashion, that they are in
fact a superior people in God’s eyes and the rest of the world simply has to accept this fact,
others argue that the notion of chosen-ness has been tragically misunderstood and caused
more problems than it is worth.
For instance, Lurie (2014), himself a Jewish Rabbi, argues that the central idea behind the
Jews as chosen is neither elitist nor exclusivist. The biblical idea sitting behind the Covenant
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is that Jews are chosen to reveal the greatest truth of all, namely that God is the Creator and
Lover of all people. They are chosen for an essentially humble and inclusive mission to take
the message to the ends of the earth that, at the end of the day, God does not choose one
people to be superior to another, but rather that God chooses all people, and indeed all of
creation, to be under his care. Understood in this way, Judaism’s mission is to be a means to
a far greater end, rather than to be an end in itself.
Christianity
As suggested above, we might imagine that Judaism is the trunk of the tree we call the
Abrahamic religions, with Christianity then being the first of the huge outgrowth branches.
Mind you, this tree would have fallen over long ago if the analogy was extended too far.
Currently the branch called Christianity is approximately 70 times the size of the trunk so
clearly the image is metaphorical. Christianity is said to be a branch in the sense that Jesus
was a Jew and so were his disciples, so the entire location of Christianity’s origins is within a
Jewish world and most of its original theology would be very hard to understand without
some understanding of its Jewish foundations (McGrath, 2006). Above all, its theology of
the High God, all creative and all powerful who relates in personal fashion to his people, is
the theology that Christianity inherited. This is the same God whom Jesus called ‘Father’. It
is the same God who made the original Covenant with Abraham, renewed it with Moses and
continually reminded the people of it through the Prophets.
Having inherited this tradition, Christianity moved on, partly through deliberate theological
venture and partly through circumstances, to re-fashion this theology into something
distinctively Christian. In the early days after Jesus’ departure, the disciples are seen to be in
hot debate about whether their new movement is best understood as being merely a branch of
Judaism, albeit one in which the Messiah (Jesus) has come or as a new religious movement
altogether. Jesus had not been specific about this and so the early church had to sort it out.
From all we are led to believe, Jesus’ own disciples were narrowly Jewish and so naturally
found it difficult to imagine life outside their Jewish experience, at that time, subjugated
politically and under siege religiously. Jews had learned to keep to themselves and live by a
strict and exclusive code. This explains many of Jesus’ confrontations with the Jewish
authorities in particular, confrontations which seemed to suggest that Jesus’ vision was of a
movement (for him, the fulfilment of all for which Judaism had really stood) that was far
more open to the foreigner and the whole world than Judaism had become.
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It was the ethic behind these confrontations, and Jesus’ explicit stance around them, that St
Paul utilised in convincing the early church, including the likes of St Peter and the original
disciples, that Christianity was not a sect of the extant Judaism, but indeed a new movement
that both fulfilled Judaism’s original mission and went beyond it. The specifics of the
argument centred on whether a newly baptised Christian needed to be circumcised first,
effectively becoming a Jew before being eligible to be Christian. The latter restriction was a
natural way for the disciples to think, granted the narrowness of their experience, including
their theological boundaries. St Paul is of course a very different ‘kettle of fish’, being
immersed in Greek culture and carrying Roman citizenship as well as being Jewish. He was
the veritable citizen of the world, used to moving in the cosmopolitan circles of the day.
Eventually the church (the name for the community of disciples which continued in Jesus’
name) would back Paul’s view that he was the one who truly understood what Jesus had
intended. In contrast with the exclusive High God theology imputed popularly of Judaism,
Christian theology came eventually to see Jesus’ Father God as the God of all peoples, truly
the creator and sustaining power of all life, including human life. Note again, above, that it is
debateable within Judaism whether Judaism should really be understood as being as
exclusivist as the popular notion suggests.
Whether or not, certainly early Pauline
Christianity is clear that anyone was eligible to be among the Chosen People, simply by
submitting to God through following the example of Jesus and confessing faith in his
Messiah-ship, this latter relating to a Jewish theology of anointing God’s chosen leader to
bring forth and endorse God’s kingdom. Eventually, Jesus would be understood as Son of
God and, together with the Holy Spirit and the Father would constitute the Godhead, a Trinity
God, one being with three Persons (or expressions). In time, the notion of God as a Trinity of
Persons would become the centre of the hottest theological debates of all within Christianity
and between Christianity and its Abrahamic siblings. It would fracture the church in the
fourth century and create the major split between East and West, known as the Eastern
Schism, in the eleventh century. We return to all of these points in later chapters.
We see in the Pauline influence on Christian inclusivism and especially in the notion of God
as a Trinity, the clear development of theological thought that was wrought by Christianity.
The essential notion of a singular all creative and all powerful High God is taken from the
parent religion, Judaism, but expanded in terms of its universal reach, its intimate relationship
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with people and its character in the form of the Trinity. Let us take each of these important
theological points in turn.
First, the notion of universal reach is seen in a God who originally chose to be Lord of a
special people now being Lord of all people; this is at least the way Christian theology tended
to interpret the connection with Judaism, gradually separating out from its dependence on
Judaism and, arguably in the process, actually relegating Judaism as the original but now
quite dispensable foundation of the Abrahamic tradition. We will see below how St Paul
pioneered this interpretation in the Letter to the Galatians, effectively relegating both Judaism
and Islam (well before historical Islam) in the interests of promoting Christian claims to be
the supreme religion. The effect was that one need not be part of the Jewish heritage,
ethnically, politically or religiously, to be among God’s people (as above, this is not
something which all Jews would disagree with anyway; nor would many Muslims). One
needs merely to submit to God the Father through following in the footsteps of the Son and in
fellowship with the Holy Spirit (this element would not be so acceptable even to the most
liberal of Jews or Muslims). This accounts for the fact that Christianity went on to become
an imperial religion and one of the great missionary religions of all time, a proselytising
mission that would see its numbers expand well beyond those of the parent religion, Judaism.
Second, the intimate relationship is seen in a God who becomes incarnate, en-fleshed as a
human being in order to relate as closely as possible with humanity. God is one with
humanity through the person of Jesus who gave an example which humanity can copy. This
is the supreme expression of an incarnation theology, a theology that rests on the notion of
God becoming human.
Third, the erstwhile simple notion of the Jewish High God, remote yet involved in his world,
evolves into the more complex Trinitarian theology of Christianity whereby the remoteness
of this High God is maintained in the Father, the involvement strengthened in the Son and the
ongoing relationship secured in the Holy Spirit. If Hinduism spawned a loose (some might
say ‘low’) trinitarian theology, Christianity developed a tight and highly sophisticated
(‘High’) Trinitarian theology (McGrath, 1990, Erickson, 2000).
Islam
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Islam can be characterised as the second huge branch of the Judaic trunk, although in a quite
different way from Christianity (Nigosian, 2004). The connection between Judaism and
Christianity is immediate. Jesus was a Jew who grew up, preached and enacted his sacred
mission in the unabashed context of Judaism in the precise place where Judaism had
flourished, the land known then as Palestine. Muhammad is neither Jewish nor Christian, as
the story goes, albeit he is clearly influenced heavily by both religions. Furthermore, the
context of the original Islam is in Arabia rather than Palestine, among a people for whom, by
and large, Judaism and Christianity were minor players, at least in their most recognizable
forms. In fact, as we shall see in later chapters, both Judaism and Christianity were present
but as virtual diaspora communities, separated from their mainstream forms. For Judaism,
this was how it had survived since the Fall of Jerusalem in 70CE, as a scattered people and a
fragmented religion that nonetheless continued to influence other peoples and religions
through its intense and codified (by the book) religious beliefs. In contrast, for Christianity,
its main survival form by the time of the official birth of Islam (622CE) was as an imperial
religion. This was the high age of Christian domination of the European world and indeed
much of the world beyond. Nonetheless, the Christians who had survived in the Arabic
world were largely displaced Christians because of their many disagreements with Roman
Imperial Christianity. In fact, Arabic Christianity had been among Christianity’s strongest
sites in the early centuries of its existence. We know that Christian communities were in
Mecca within a century of the birth of Christianity and that one of its strongest communities,
with a fully-fledged bishop, was in Alexandria in Egypt by about 150CE.
Regardless of their relative weaknesses as religious influences in the world into which
Muhammad was born, nonetheless there seems little doubt that it is in part Judaism and
Christianity that, between them, inspired his mission to establish Islam and, within that
inspiration, it is the universal High God theology of Judaism and Christianity that sits at the
centre of Islam. Indeed, many Muslim scholars and others would argue that it is in Islam that
the conception of God as a single all-powerful, all creative and all-loving God is perfected.
For Muhammad’s Arabic people, whose religions were multifarious if not chaotic and for
whom a god could be as troublesome a feature as helpful, the notion of a single, all loving, all
caring God is what he wants to instil, according to the stories about him.
The way the story is conveyed, Muhammad seems to have been an intense student of both
Judaism and Christianity, taking elements from both into the original Islamic theology. From
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Judaism, he took the central concept of the High God who is remote, yet caring. Of the
remoteness, he exacerbates the notion, rendering God unable to be named or even
represented. God is ‘Who is’ (Allah), the ultimate source of all being. There can therefore be
no naming or characterisation of God for that would be to reduce God to something less than
what he is. Of the caring, he sharpens it in the very notion of Islam itself. Islam is ‘to
submit’ to ‘Who is’ whose love for humanity is what sustains it. This is not a caring of one
entity for another but of an entwined entity. Without the love and care of ‘Who is’, there
would be no humanity. The one who understands this therefore submits. The other central
feature of Judaism on which Islam relies is the entire story of the promise that God made
initially with Abraham, then through his son and heir (for most Muslims, this means Ishma’il
rather than Isaac), reinforced through Moses (Musa) and thereon through the Prophets who
constantly remind the Jewish authorities that God wants mercy and justice rather than pomp
and sacrifice. Muhammad identified himself as being in the line of the Prophets (the last and
greatest of the Prophets) and so Islam is rightly understood as a prophetic religion above all
else.
From Christianity, Muhammad takes two key elements into Islamic theology. Allah is in
many respects more like the Christian God the Father than the Jewish High God in that Allah
is truly Lord of the World, there for all who submit, rather than in any way a partial God who
loves one people more than any other people (again, note there are many Jews who believe
this is a fundamental misinterpretation of Judaic beliefs anyway). In Islam, there is no
particular ethnic, political or religious eligibility required of the one who submits, who
becomes Muslim. Allah is not an exclusive God but the veritable ground of all being.
Anyone who recognizes this, understands it and submits to God belongs thereafter to God’s
people. This is what Islam is. The other Christian feature that Islam relies on is the person of
Jesus himself. From the way the story is told, it would seem that Jesus was Muhammad’s
own greatest prophet, described in places as the first prophet of Islam. Jesus (Issa) was a
foundational prophetic character in the early development of Islam; hence, in the Qur’an and
Hadith, one finds more reference to Jesus than one finds in the canonical Christian gospels.
Similarly, one finds far more about Mary, Jesus’ mother, than one finds in the gospels, by
which we mean the gospels that can be found in today’s Christian scriptures. Indeed, Mary is
accorded with her own sura, or chapter in the Qur’an; she is a far stronger and more central
character, quite prophetic in herself, than the fairly meek and mild marginal character to be
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found in the Canonical gospels. This all underlines the important influence that the older
Abrahamic branch, Christianity, had on the younger one, Islam.
For all the similarities between Islam, Judaism and Christianity, there are also some profound
differences. As mentioned above, Islam finally differs with Judaism around the notion of
God’s exclusivity, assuming for the moment that this is an accurate depiction of Judaism. It
is a deep sticking point in relations between Judaism and Islam that one religion identifies
itself as God’s exclusive ‘Chosen People’ while the other religion believes that the same God
is a God for all people (again, note importantly that many Jews and Muslims are in agreement
on this latter view even while their political institutions are not). It underlines the central
importance of theological understanding that, in our own time and throughout the many
negotiations between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, this potent theological difference
has rarely if ever been addressed. One might venture to say that, until it is addressed and
resolved in some fashion, there will be no accord in the Middle East. Needless to say, the
Islamic view is as profound a threat to conservative forces in Judaism as any they could hope
to deal with. While the (Christian) West implicitly accepts Judaism’s claims around this
issue, together with the attached land issues, it is a sticking point for Islam that violates its
deepest held understanding of what Islam stands for.
The elements of Christianity that Islam rejects are equally a most grievous threat to
conservative Christian forces. While Islam regards Jesus far more highly than does Judaism
(for which Jesus is informally recognised as a wise teacher but remains officially a nonentity), nonetheless Islam rejects Christianity’s estimation of Jesus as God or even Son of
God. Indeed, so profoundly does Islam hold to the notion of a single, in-divisible High God
that the very idea that God could spawn a son or reveal himself in human fashion amounts to
heresy of the first order. The Qur’an is explicit about this. The fact that the Qur’an puts the
rejection of his divinity in Jesus’ own mouth does nothing to soften the antagonism between
these sibling religions.
Conclusion
In summary, the theologies of the Abrahamic religions have much in common and much that
divides them. What is in common fits well with our definition of theology. The three
religions share the main conception of the spiritual (other) as an all creative, all powerful, all
loving High God. They share in many of the experiences of this High God and they share
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many of the ways in which this experience is conveyed, most especially through sacred text.
For each of them, the Torah, the Bible or the Qur’an represent ways in which God’s
revelation to the world is captured in textual form. These three religions constitute the
‘Religions of the Book’. At the same time, we could go through and depict the differences
between them against the items of this definition as well. Either in common or in dispute, it
will only be through understanding their theologies that many of the contemporary tensions
and conflicts that threaten world order might be resolved. When so many of the most
intractable conflicts have theological underpinnings, the continuance of
theology-free
dialogue, negotiations and threats between Islam and the ‘Judaeo-Christian’ West is bound to
result in failure to resolve anything.
References
Ata ur-Rahmin, M. & Thomson, A. (2002). Jesus: Prophet of Islam. Norwich: Diwan Press.
Avery-Peck, A. & Neusner, J. (Eds.), The Blackwell reader in Judaism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Erickson, M. (2000). Making sense of the Trinity. Grand rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
Lodahl, M. (2010). Claiming Abraham: Reading the Bible and the Qur’an side by side.
Grand Rapids, MN: Brazos Press.
Lurie, A. (2014). What does it mean that the Jews are God’s chosen people? Huffington Post,
29 June.
McGrath, A. (1990). Understanding the Trinity. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
McGrath, A. (2006). Christianity: An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nigosian, S. (2004). Islam: Its history, teaching and practices. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Peters, F. (2004). The children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
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