Let's Not Bicker And Argue About Who's Killing Who

Robert T. Miller looks at The Name of God at FIRST THINGS:

Tiny Muskens, the Roman Catholic bishop of Breda in the Netherlands, says that Dutch Catholics ought to pray using the word Allah rather than God or its synonyms in Dutch. Muskens argues that it makes no inherent theological difference in which language one prays, and he notes that in countries where the word Allah is in common usage as a name for God, Christians already often use the word in their prayers. Adopting the word Allah, Muskens thinks, will eliminate "discussions and bickerings" between Muslims and Christians and so improve relations between the religions.

Muskens is right that, from a Catholic point of view, there is nothing inherently wrong in saying "Allah" for "God," just as there would be nothing inherently wrong in saying "Miny Tuskens" or "Tuny Miskens" for "Tiny Muskens." The problem, of course, is Tiny Muskens' name is Tiny Muskens, and anyone who called Tiny Tuny or Muskens Miskens would be making fun of him. So, too, in theology; despite the conventionality by which strings of phonemes get their meaning, once names have been established, people who change them are doing so for a reason, and the nature of that reason counts in determining whether the change is reasonable or unreasonable, advisable or inadvisable.

In this case, even from a Catholic point of view, the name of God is not a pure triviality. When at the burning bush Moses asked God for his name, the Lord gave a very particular answer. "God said to Moses, I am who am. This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations" (Exod. 3:14-15). Many devout Jews treat this name, especially in Hebrew, with such reverence that they will not speak it aloud. And when Christ appropriated this name to himself (John 8:58), everyone understood that he was proclaiming his own divinity.

On the other hand, some Muslims believe that the phonetic string "Allah" is an especially appropriate name for God, in part because, in their understanding, "Allah" has no feminine or plural forms. Thus, even many non-Arabic-speaking Muslims refer to God as "Allah" and do so for reasons of theological importance in Islam. Hence, it's unclear what might be at stake theologically in the unlikely event that anyone were to take Muskens' proposal seriously.

But debating the merits of Muskens' suggestion misses the larger point here. Muskens makes it sound as if the problems in Muslim-Catholic relations were merely silly arguments about semantics that distract from the truly important things on which we all agree. In fact, there is a serious, substantive problem dominating Christian-Muslim relations at the moment, the same problem that dominates Muslim-Jewish, Muslim-Buddhist, Muslim-Hindu, and Muslim-Orthodox relations, and that problem is that Muslim fanatics keep murdering innocents of all faiths, including their own, in terror attacks.

The name is not the problem. What's being done in the name is.