re: #358 McSpiff

So the fact that Islam recognizes Jesus as a Messenger of God and Christianity inherently recognizes Judaism doesn’t imply that the God referenced in all three is the same God?

I’d say no, and this for a range of reasons:

1) Jesus is, on the Muslim view, a prophet of Islam, whose teachings were distorted and rejected by those who claimed to take them up. Mohammed came later, and received the correct, pure, undistorted word. Very different

2) Christianity certainly doesn’t recognize Judaism except as a fact of history and anthropology. Were Christianity and Judaism even slightly similar, there might not be a Christianity in the first place. Christianity is very different from Judaism.

3) Judaism can, intellectually, recognize traces of its teachings and traditions in the two later faiths. Hardly surprising, but certainly NOT grounds for concluding similarities of theology or even supporting the claim that all three are referring to the same Being.

Or, another way:

The Divine is like fire - it is uniform in its properties, but diverse in its effects on matter. It hardens eggs, softens wax, and boils water - these are three very different things it does. While its nature (fire’s) is unchanged in each of these three interactions with matter, the effects are varied, and therefore, for an egg, Fire is a hardening thing; for wax, it is a softening thing, and for water, it is that which boils things away. These three characterisations of Fire are so radically different as to lead one to conclude that - even though in all three cases the same agency is at work - the diversity of effect is such as to obscure this fact, and therefore, Fire for an egg is not the same as Fire for wax.