6 – Major differences on God’s nature

Christianity and Islam are in sharp contradiction about the nature and attributes of God.

Some of the main differences:

• For Christianity there is the unique concept of Trinity: one God with 3 manifestations (see more at Christianity/Trinity here). Islam does not accept such thing.

The Trinity idea and the idea that God is Love in Christianity are totally compatible. God could not be love, perfect love, if He is entirely alone.

• In Islam, Allah is transcendent, distant and difficult to know. He is separate from His creation. He is exalted and far removed from mankind. While we may know His will, we cannot know Him personally. In fact, there is very little written about His character. He is the creator and sustainer of the creation, but He is also unknowable. No person can personally know and have a relationship with Allah. Instead, humans are to be in total submission to the will of Allah. Moreover, Allah does not personally enter into human history. Instead, he deals with the world through His word (the Qur’an), through His prophets (such as Muhammad), and through angels (such as Gabriel).

In Christianity the God of the Bible is a God one can trust, and with whom one may develop a personal relationship. It is a God who, despite His omnipotence and infinite wisdom, longs for personal relationships with His fallen creation, a God who would do anything to save even the last sheep that’s lost, through His own effort, God being love itself.

• Some Muslims say that Allah means in fact God (literally) but the historic evidence shows that at the origin of the Arabian culture there was a god of the moon, the moon being a powerful symbol for the Islam, the Muslims using a moon calendar. Another contradiction about saying that Allah means the same God is the very fact that in the Muslim countries Christians are persecuted and do not have the right to even use the name of Allah. Why should they be persecuted if they talk about the same God?

(Sources: Wikipedia, ‘Jesus among other gods’, Ravi Zacharias)