Written by R.C. Sproul |
Saturday, December 17, 2022
Islam has no cross and no resurrection, articles of the faith that are of the essence of Christianity and of ultimate importance to the plan of the God of the Bible. Mohammed made no atonement for our sins when he died. And when he died, he stayed dead. There are other crucial differences we could explore of how God is understood in orthodox Christianity and how He is understood in orthodox Islam. It is enough for now to say that Allah and Yahweh are not the same. One is the living God; the other is an idol.

A rose is a rose is a rose. This dictum reinforces the adage that a rose by any other name is still a rose. The idea is that the essence of the rose is not conditioned by what name is attached to it. It is its res, not its nomina, that determines what it is. In different languages, the same flower is known by different names, but it is still the same flower.
When we apply this idea to theology things get a bit more complicated. Indeed the rose adage has been transferred indiscriminately to religion in order to create a theological concept. The concept is: “God by any other name is still God.” Now certainly, it is true that the immutable essence of God is not changed by the alteration of His name. In English, we may say “God,” in German “Gott,” in Greek “Theos,” yet all these names or words are used to point to the same Deity.
Beyond this, however, things get murky. It is a quantum leap to go from saying that God by any other name is still God, to saying that all the great religions in the world believe in the same Being though they call Him different names.
This irrational leap is prodded by the popular analogy of the mountain. This analogy notes that their are many roads up the mountain. Some progress on a more direct route, while others wind about on more circuitous roads, but sooner or later they all arrive at the same place, at the top of the mountain.
Do all roads lead to God?
So, it is argued, there are many roads that lead to God. They may be different routes but they all end up in the same place—with God Himself. That is, the differing roads indicate no difference in the God who is found. God’s being, then, becomes the lowest (or highest) common denominator of all religions.
The road analogy is buttressed by the democratic truism that all religions are equal under the law. The fallacy in this axiom is thinking that just because all religions enjoy equal tolerance under the civil law, they therefore are all equally valid. That might be true if there were no God, but then it would be better to say that with respect to their ultimate affirmation they are all equally invalid.
To argue that all religions ultimately believe in the same God is the quintessential nonsense statement. Even a cursory examination of the content of different religions reveals this. The nature of the Canaanite deity Baal differs sharply from the nature of the biblical God. They are not remotely the same. This sharp distinction is also seen when comparing the God of Israel with the gods and goddesses of Roman, Greek, or Norse mythology.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, July 17, 2022
God made all this with a word. Think how much bigger he is than me. Imagine the biggest thing possible, God is bigger. In every way you could possibly imagine and many we could not. Marvel at the God who spun the stars on his tapestry. And then realise he’s grander than that. And bigger than that. And more wonderful than that. And be drawn into the worship of the one who Anselm called That Than Which None Greater Can Be Conceived.

Have you ever stood next to something truly huge? The typical examples are the Grand Canyon or a giant Redwood tree, but I’ve not been to North America. My huge things are smaller—in part because my green and pleasant nation is.
I remember how small Edinburgh looks from the top of Arthur’s Seat, or the dramatic view up Dovedale in the winter, or how big the sky is in Yorkshire, or Durdle Door rising from the sea by Lulworth Cove.
When you see something naturally big, or beautiful, or dramatic, or just find a standpoint that makes what our hands have made look small, it’s easier to reflect on the Lord who made them. There’s something worshipful about it. We think about how big Yahweh must be that he made these beautiful things with his voice as he spoke them into being. We start to write our own version of Isaiah 40—he scooped Dovedale with his fingers, he stoops to find Arthur’s Seat.
Here’s the thing. He’s a lot bigger than that. We’re like grasshoppers to him (Isaiah 40). Except the difference is much bigger. Ok, we think, like he scooped Dovedale but times a thousand, wow! Except that’s not it either, we’re making a category mistake.
Before I go on, I want to head off a thought. This reads at the moment like a well ackshually comment from that kind of theologically informed but emotionally dead person you find on the internet who wants to ruin your faith with all their minutiae. I should know, I’ve been that guy. I don’t want this to be that. Please keep gazing at trees and mountains and thinking “wow!” about the God who made them. That’s absolutely the right thing to do, and the Old Testament is chock full of it.
What I’m hoping to do is make your apprehension of God bigger, but we should still have our mind blown by the stars.
We could scale this up, look at what we know about the Universe and think “God made that! He must be huge!”
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
When the intellectual elites of our culture allow sentiment to supplant reason, then the discourse of public life is in grave trouble. We should know this from seeing what happens when sentiment comes to dominate other branches of our culture. Art becomes kitsch. And ethics becomes a matter of responding to the latest sob story and the immediate appetites of the moment without reflection on broader social needs, goods, or consequences.

Today, as in the days of Plato, rhetoric is what moves the crowd. But as Plato knew, truth, not rhetoric, is the task of philosophy and philosophers. That is why the latter are so important. Sadly, many in today’s philosopher class—the intellectuals—seem to have forgotten Plato. They now find rhetoric more attractive than truth. Last week provided yet another example of this when a number of British religious leaders signed a letter to the prime minister, Boris Johnson, calling for transgender people to receive the same protection from “conversion therapy” as other LGBTQ+ individuals.
The letter is a good example of how sentimental mush has come to replace careful moral reasoning in the minds of so many. The usual therapeutic patois is on full display. The language of becoming whole, of safe place, of affirmation, is strewn throughout the piece, and the postmodern ethicist’s empty-but-persuasive word of choice, “journey,” appears twice, once even qualified with the adjective “sacred.”
The letter is light on actual theology but does make peculiar comment on conversion therapy and prayer: “To allow those discerning this journey to be subject to coercive or undermining practices is to make prayer a means of one person manipulating another.”
The logic of this sentence seems to imply that to pray for a transgender person to become comfortable with his biological sex is a form of “conversion therapy.” As such, prayer is to be equated with coercion and bullying. Do these religious leaders think that prayer changes nothing and that any claim otherwise makes it simply a tool for exercising psychological power over another? Or do they think that the only petitions that should be made on behalf of trans people are those that confirm their self-diagnosis? If the former, then why bother praying for anything at all? If the latter, what about the growing number of de-transitioners, many of whom would no doubt have been grateful if somebody had prayed for them and also intervened in some other way before they permanently mutilated their bodies?
Yet as confused as that sentence is, it is not the most disturbing aspect of the letter. That honor must be given to the presence of Rowan Williams’s signature.
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