Interesting article by Steve Chalke in this month's Christianity mag, answering the question 'Is Allah, the Muslim god just another name for yahweh, the God of the Bible?'
I'm not going to go through his arguement, which centres on Abraham, but he makes the following points:
1) Islam honours the first five books of the Bible among its sacred texts, including the Shema, and draws heavily on them.
2) Muslims consider them to be the word of God given to Moses.
3) Allah is the term used for God in Arabic. hundreds of years before being used by Muslims it was used by Arabic speaking Christians as they worshipped Yahweh.
Chalke concludes by suggesting that Allah is not so much a false god so much as a partially known God, as Yahweh is fully and finally revealed through Jesus alone. He points to Paul who built from, rather than ignored the worship of the 'unknown God' when he dealt with the people in Athens in Acts 17, and suggests that this should be our approach.
Food for thought, anyway!
No comments:
Post a Comment