Don’t you think a way to ease tensions with Muslims would be for everyone to start using “Allah” instead of “God?” After all God does not care what we call Him, so why not yield a little to the Muslin ways?

If God (or Allah) does not care what we call Him, then why not suggest everyone (including Muslims) start using God instead of Allah? For Christians to call God ‘Allah’ isn’t only a conciliatory gesture or even mere appeasement; it is submission.

Now some may argue that it would not require a theological leap for Christians to use the name “Allah” for “God” and it would reinforce the fact that Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the same God. Then an immediate theological problem we would have would be in re-writing the Apostles’ Creed as well as our other creeds to include “Allah.”

For anyone to assume that God does not care what we call Him contradicts what is clearly noted in Scripture. God very clearly names Himself in Scripture. The Christian faith is based exclusively in the understanding that God alone has the right to name Himself. Christianity is based in God’s revelation of Himself. Without God’s gracious self-revelation, we would know nothing about Him at all. The doctrine of the Trinity is itself a truth revealed by God about Himself as an act of His own self-giving grace and mercy to His human creatures. He does not invite His creatures to experiment in worship by naming Him according to their own desires.

The problem with “peace and love” (never mind truth) post-modern liberals is that they speak in idioms of sociology and psychology, while we speak in theological or philosophical language. Ecumenicalism does NOT mean splitting the difference or soft pedaling our real differences. Unity must be built on truth and must never come about at the expense of truth. Truth always trumps unity and peace.

A good Roman Catholic theologian friend once wrote me that to be ecumenical means to disagree with anything that orthodox Christianity maintains. Yet, unfortunately, the prevailing opinion in postmodern America today is that that while the various religions have different names for God, basically they are all speaking of the same God.

Allah is NOT the God of the Bible. While it is true Muslims defend to the utmost the unity of God, they utterly deny His tri-unity; they totally reject the notion of God as Father, the deity of Jesus Christ as Son, and the divinity of the Holy Spirit.

For the Muslim, calling God Father and Jesus Christ Son suggests to them procreation. In the Qur’an, Sura 19:35, it states that Allah should not beget a son and Sura 112:3 states that Allah “begetteth not, nor is he begotten.” However, the Bible does not speak of begotten in terms of a sexual reproduction but in terms of a special relationship between the Father and the Son. John 1:14 is emphasizing the deity of Christ when it says that He was the only begotten of the Father and when Paul speaks of Jesus as the firstborn over all creation (Colossians 1:15-19) he is pointing out Christ’s preeminence as the Creator of all things. We Christians are the children of God through adoption while Jesus is God the Son from all eternity.

Muslims also vehemently denounce the Christian doctrine of the deity of Christ as the unforgivable sin of shirk (Sura 4:116). Yes, it is true that Muslims will affirm Christ was sinless, BUT they dogmatically deny His sacrifice upon the cross and His resurrection. The Qur’an in Sura 4:158 states that Allah raised him up meaning that Jesus was supernaturally taken up rather than being resurrected from the dead. They hold that someone (perhaps Judas) was crucified in His place, for which they cite a late medieval Gnostic writing, “The Gospel of Barnabas.” Sura 4:157 states, “they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them.”

Muslims also reject the divinity of the Holy Spirit and teach instead that the Holy Spirit is the archangel Gabriel who, over a 23-year period, supposedly dictated the Qur’an to Mohammed who could neither read nor write. Mohammed in turn dictated the Qur’an to his scribes. According to Islam, the “Comforter” or the Holy Spirit promised by Jesus in John’s Gospel (chapter 14) is Mohammed. But the Bible (Acts 5:3-4 and Romans 8:11) clearly states that the Holy Spirit is neither an angel nor human but is the very God who has redeemed us and will resurrect us to eternal life. Therefore, the triune God of the Bible cannot be the same God as “Allah,” the God of Islam.