Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

SPROUL: One way you could look at it is to say that there is only one God—Yahweh. So, you could say that every form of pagan worship is a worship of the one true God, though a distorted, corrupted style of worship that goes back to the question of idolatry.

If you mean to ask whether the content of the theology of Islam with respect to the nature and being of God is the same as you find in the Christian understanding of the being and character of God, I would say that there’s very little resemblance between the two.

So, the simple answer would be no, we don’t worship the same God.

THOMAS: I don’t think that you can separate the doctrine of the Trinity from your definition of God. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Let’s take one of those: God is Christ. Does Islam worship Christ as God? And the answer is no, it does not. So the answer is no, we don’t worship the same God.

You can only answer yes if you can somehow argue that there is a generic God that everybody worships and then there’s a Christian God, but that’s a slippery slide to pluralism. It’s not an argument that makes any sense within the uniqueness of Christianity and the specific claim of Christianity that there is only one God. So the answer is no.

This is a transcript of R.C. Sproul’s and Derek Thomas’s answers from our Theology in Dialogue event and has been lightly edited for readability. To ask Ligonier a biblical or theological question, email ask@ligonier.org or message us on Facebook or Twitter.