I received a response to my post about Christians calling God "Allah," but for certain reasons, this person did not want his/her name attached to it. So, I post it as by "Anonymous." Food for thought:
To the matter of concern: should Christians call God 'Allah'? Another way of looking at it is: should Christians call God 'God'? 'God' is not a biblical word, but of Germanic derivation from 'Gott'. It was adopted and adapted as the term for Christianity's deity as the gospel spread through northern Europe and westward. Just as 1st century Christians accepted 'Theos' and 'Kurios' as designations for the Hebrew God and infused it with new meaning, so did Christians with the word 'Gott' and eventually 'God'.
There were Christians in the Middle East using 'Allah' for their deity before Europeans/Westerners ever heard the gospel. Thus, your statement: "for Christians to begin calling God "allah" would be misleading and would actually confuse the important differences between the two faiths" is problematic. 'Allah' is just as acceptable a term for the Creator as 'God'. What matters is the meaning attached to these words and the lingua franca where people live. Obviously, Arab believers' use of 'Allah' in the Middle East would carry the roughly meaning as our use of the term 'God' in the USA, but the Muslims concept of 'Allah' would be different. However, any informed Christian could use 'Theos', 'Gott', 'God', or 'Deus' (which is Portuguese), and be rightly referring to the true and holy One.
Hence, the matter worthy of debate is not linguistical but lexical, that is, having to do with the meaing of these words.
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2 comments:
this is a great discussion. Especially with Christians as of late, seemingly taking a condescending written tone with upper case and lower case letters. Already, even the name God is set apart by Christians from the term god. For this reason, we seem to struggle even with biblical phrases such as "The LORD is God, the great King over all other gods. Or even ...have no other gods before me.
Lately, I've heard a lot of grief given to musicians who you use the term yah, or jah, to refer to the same God I call God, because that's the term used by those to whom they are ministering. I really don't see much difference between this and Paul's references in his dialogue with the aeropostale, or whoever those folks in Athens were. :-)
Here in Burkina Faso where I live Allah is used by everyone--Animists, Christians and Muslims--to refer to the Creator God. Arab traders introduced the term and Christian missionaries later adopted it but injected it with new meaning.
These theological discussions remind me of Friday night Bible study discussions that 3 Cleveland high school students used to have many years ago!
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