I have learned a good deal from Paul Helm through the years, and frequently I find that he and I are on the same page. Such was the case when I read his post today, entitled “Getting into Hot Water.”
It is tempting to just republish his whole post, and I’m going to reprint much of it here, but you can check the link if you want more. Since I agree so substantially with his perspective, I’ll make no other comment.
Helm writes:
Do Christians and Jews worship the same God? Could they worship the same God? The answe
r has to do with the complex matter of reference, and the conditions of its success. How much do two people have to know in common for their words and actions to be words that apply to the same person, or to the true God, and their actions are successfully directed to them? In the case of God, Suppose that the two both use the words ‘Creator of the heavens and the earth’ to refer to God. There is only one such Creator. Christians say that he is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Others attribute to him other and incompatible properties. Though mistaken about a serious and substantial matter in respect of a person, we may nevertheless succeed in hitting the target. What about referring to the same God? How about a classical theist and an openness theologian? Or the God of Christian orthodoxy and that of American civil religion?
It is possible to approach this problem of worshipping the same God from another angle, from needs that men and women may have which only God can meet; supremely the need for mercy and forgiveness. It was in recommending such a course that I got into hot water.
Some years ago, before many of you were born, I was at a conference in Canada on missions. I cannot now remember whether it was in the paper I gave, or in discussion later, that I ventured the view that if, in Auschwitz, say, a Jew sincerely prayed ‘Lord have mercy upon me’, that prayer would be heard. And similarly if a Muslim prayed, Most merciful Allah, have mercy on me, then similarly. Why may we not believe that a cry for mercy may find its way through the fog of error and misapprehension to the one and only merciful God? Do we have an interest in narrowing the wideness of God’s mercy? Are we entitled to take this line?
When I returned home I received a letter from Iain Murray pointing out that one of those who objected vociferously to the sentiments I expressed in Canada was a solid supporter of the work of the Trust who had been in touch. However the effect of this letter was somewhat spoiled by the fact that W.G.T. Shedd, whose volumes of sermons the Trust had re-published and whose Calvinism Pure and Mixed: A Defence of the Westminster Standards the Trust also re-published, in 1986, expressed similar views.
Here’s a typical passage of Shedd’s:
And since regeneration in the instance of the adult immediately produces faith and repentance, a regenerate heathen is both a believer and a penitent. He feels sorrow for sin, and the need of mercy. This felt need of mercy and desire for it is potentially and virtually faith in the Redeemer. For although the Redeemer has not been presented to him historically and personally as the object of faith, yet the Divine Spirit by the new birth has wrought in him the sincere and longing disposition to believe in him. With the penitent and believing man in the Gospel he says, ‘Who is he, Lord, that I might believe in him?’ (John 9.36). Such a man is ‘regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit’, and belongs to that class of ‘elect persons who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Spirit’. (Westminster Conf. X.3) (pages 128-9)
Did Shedd have a different God from Warfield, who strenuously objected to this view? (See ‘God’s Providence Over All’ in Vol I of Warfield’s Selected Shorter Writings, for a sample.) Would that then make one of them an idolator? If so, then which one, I wonder?
