Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures. D. E. Buckner

reference, identity, truth, and existence. The main thesis is that all reference is story-relative. We cannot tell which historical individual a person is talking or writing about or addressing in prayer without familiarity with the narrative (oral or written), which introduces that individual to us. Thus, we cannot understand reference to God, nor to his prophets, nor to any other character mentioned in the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim scriptures, without reference to those very scriptures. In this context, we must understand God as the person who “walked in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8), and who is continuously referred to in the books of the Old and New Testament, as well as (I argue) the Quran. Singular reference and singular conception is empty outside such a context.

      

      No substantive original thesis in biblical hermeneutics or theology is intended, although I will try to use the most recent scholarly views in both topics, and clearly there will be some theological implications of what is primarily a philosophical thesis. For example, the “classical” conception of God, namely as uncaused, uncreated, unchanging, and transcendent creator of the universe, can clearly be arrived at by some process of natural reason, unaided by revelation (except the “revelation” of pure reason), and independently of scriptural authority. But if we cannot understand the name “God” without reference to biblical texts, reason on its own cannot reveal God to us.

      The method will be, as far as possible, to avoid the technical apparatus and terminology of modern mathematical logic. Technical concepts (singular reference, identity, subject and predicate, proposition, and so on) are unavoidable, but will be presented in the context of biblical narrative in a way that clearly illustrates the concepts, showing rather than explicitly describing them. No position on the existence or non-existence of God, or of his nature, or of the truth or falsity of any of the three scriptures, is intended, nor should any be understood.

      NOTES

      1. Strictly speaking, the English expression “God” is almost never used to translate the tetragrammaton. It translates elohim, a common noun meaning “god” or “gods.” “Y hw h” is a proper name that is used much less frequently. The only instances in which “Y hw h” is translated as “God” are passages containing the combination of words “adonai Y hw h,” meaning “the lord Y hw h,” occurs, conventionally translated as “the lord GOD,” the capitals corresponding to the tetragrammaton in the Hebrew text.

      2. John of Damascus, Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 94, 767.

      3. Translated Resnick, 2016.

      4. Niketas Byzantios (Niketas of Byzantium), Confutatio dogmatum Mahomedis, in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 105, 792, my emphasis.

      5. Ibid., 793.

      6. Quran 17:111.

      7. 1 John 5:7.

      8. Jayson Casper, “What Arab Christians Think of Wheaton-Hawkins ‘Same God’ Debate: Controversy echoes what Mideast Christians have wrestled with for centuries,” Christianity Today, January 13, 2016, my emphasis.

      9. Edward Feser, “Liberalism and Islam,” 2016, http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/liberalism-and-islam.html.

      10. Bob Smietana, “Wheaton College Suspends Hijab-Wearing Professor after ‘Same God’ Comment,” Christianity Today, December 15, 2015.

      11. My emphasis.

      12. William F. Vallicella, “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?” Typepad, December 22, 2015, https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/12/do-christians-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god.html.

      13. Jayson Casper, Christianity Today, January 13, 2016, my emphasis.

      14. Porphyry, Isagoge, in Busse 1887, 7, trans. Owen, O.F., The Organon, or Logical Treatises of Aristotle, 617.

      15. Peter Abelard, Dialectica, in De 569 (f. 197r–v), see also Ashworth, “Medieval theories of singular terms.”

      16. Ibid., Antequam musicus esset, Socrates dictus est, vel postquam filius Sophronisci non erit, Socrates dicetur.

      17. Which would be impossible, for instance, if the semantic theory involved Russellian propositions, supposedly Platonic entities expressed by sentences which “entrap” their components. If the sentence “God is Allah” expressed such a proposition, God (and Allah) would be such an entrapped component. Alston (Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience, 10) faces a similar difficulty. His book is designed for a general audience, so he avoids terms like “awareness of God,” which suggest that God exists, preferring to speak of experiences that are “taken by the subject to be an awareness of God.” But this still requires using the term “God,” and so requires a semantic theory, acceptable to believers and non-believers alike, that explains the term “God.”

Chapter 1

       Reference Statements

      I have little to say about prayer or worship. The question of this book is about reference. If the name “Allah” in the Quran refers to what “The Lord” refers to in the New Testament or to what “YHWH” refers to in the Hebrew Bible, then clearly Jews, Christians, and Muslims are referring to the same god, whatever language they speak. If praying to is a form of address using a name, and if the name refers to the same being, then Jews, Christians, and Muslims are praying to the same god.¹ But many deny this, particularly when it comes to the possible identity of God and Allah.

      Nor am I primarily concerned with the question of the existence of the individuals mentioned in the Bible, including that of the divine being himself. There is independent contemporary evidence for the existence of some of the individuals mentioned in the New Testament, including Herod Archelaus and Herod the Great (whose names are on coins), Pontius Pilate (referenced as “prefect of Judea” on a limestone inscription discovered in 1961), and Quirinius (mentioned on a tomb inscription), but this book is not primarily about the historical truth of the Bible, nor the existence of any or all of the biblical characters. It is about how we are able to refer to or identify them. If reference is a relation of some kind between language and reality, what is the nature of that relation? How can there be such a relation if some of the characters do not even exist? How is reference successful, given our limited information about the individuals referred to? In particular, how can we succeed in referring to the same person or being, even when we do not know that we are doing so? How can the writers of the New Testament refer to people in the Hebrew Bible, such as Isaiah and Moses? How can the Quran refer to the same people? What being are they talking about when they use the proper names “God,” “יְהֹוָה” or “ﷲ”?

      

      The central puzzle is what makes the following reference statement true (or false).

      The second word of the Quran refers to God.

      If we can answer this, we can answer the question of whether Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God. The reference statement contains a mentioning term (“second word of the Quran”), the verb phrase “refers to,” and the referring term “God,” as well as implying the existence of a mentioned term that is not in the statement itself, namely the second word of the Quran, the word we translate as “Allah” or “God,” transliterated as “al-lāhi.”² Clearly the statement is true when the mentioned term (the second word of the Quran) co-refers with the referring term (“God”). If the second word of the Quran refers to some divine being X, and if “God” in the aforementioned statement also refers to X, the identity statement “God is Allah” is true.³

      The thesis of this book is that such co-reference is not an extralinguistic relation between the two terms and an external, extralinguistic object