Where I can’t go is as far as saying that there’s no sense in which they worship God. II Kings 17 insists on saying the syncretistic worshipers of Yahweh and other gods in the resettled northern kingdom were both (1) worshiping Yahweh and (2) not truly worshiping him. Their idolatary meant their worship of him was not genuine, and thus their worship was not truly worship of him. But the fact that they deliberately intended to be calling on the name of the god of the region they were inhabiting means that it was him that they were failing to worship properly.

The Bible itself uses this very language, so we should be willing to use it as well. If you can’t allow for both senses, then the passage is contradictory in saying that they both feared Yahweh and that they didn’t fear Yahweh.

I get what you’re saying, but my concern is this: saying, “They worship God in error” leads one to think that it’s simply a debate over worship, not an issue of theology or saving knowledge of God.

No one worships God in perfect truth or knowledge. But there’s an important distinction between our worship of Christ being a mixture of truth and error, and not worshiping Christ at all.

My concern with saying Jews, Muslims, and Christians worship the same God is that it muddies what ought to be a clear line of demarcation — not because of worship practices, but because in not having the Son, they do not have the Father (Jn 5:23; 1 Jn 2:23).

Just curious — how does John 5:23 fit into your argument?

“He who does not (honor, revere, respect) the Son does not (honor, revere, respect) the Father”

http://honeyandlocusts.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/discerning-the-doctrines-interspirituality-pt-i/

Jeff and Daryl: If all you mean by “false god” is that they aren’t worshiping God properly (and thus their religion is false), then I have no problem with that, but I do think that way of putting it is misleading. It could be just as misleading to say as President Bush did that Muslims worship the same God as Christians. I would prefer to speak more precisely than either of those. But I think Bush’s statement is literally true, and the statement that Muslims worship a false god is literally false, even if what some people mean by it is true enough.

Todd: McLaren does a lot of things that I wouldn’t approve of. Rick Warren isn’t in the same category because he happens to work with them in doing good works. I’ve never seen any legitimate evidence that Warren compromises on the gospel itself, despite lots of slanderous claims that I’ve seen that he does. All it’s taken is a little fact-checking on my part to figure that out.

How about preaching the Gospel to them instead of lying to them about there eternal state?

Yes. It seems like “If you reject me, you reject the One who sent me” comes into play here.

The Muslim rejection of Jesus as the Christ would then necessitate their rejection of YHWH, making Allah (which isn’t only their word for god but is also his proper name), a false god.

That’s a fair enough comment. But I think the difference with the Samaritan woman is that Jesus came to her understand what she did not yet know (Jn 4:22), whereas Islam is founded on an explicit rejection of Christ as Lord, savior, and mediator.

I also meant “false god” broadly in the sense that all worship not centered on Christ involves idolatry at some point. A god who can be approached apart from Christ is a false god, even if you call him YHWH.

There’s no question that Muslims believe a lot of false things about God and engage in false religious practices, but they believe these false things about the God of Abraham. Their terms referring to God happen to be in a different language (e.g. they use ‘Allah’, which is the Arabic word for God), but that doesn’t magically make it refer to a different being. If I start calling President Obama “Baruch” and then start spreading a bunch of false rumors about him, would we say that I’m talking about someone else, or would we just accuse me of saying false things about him while using a different name for him?

This is much more like the case of the Samaritans than it is like the pagan nations around Israel who worshiped idols. Keep in mind how Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman. He didn’t pretend she was worshiping God properly (he contrasted what she did with worshiping in spirit and truth, and he called her on her sinful behavior), but he also didn’t tell her she was worshiping a false god, even though her people denied large parts of the Bible, with almost no notion of a coming Messiah, and her people used a severely edited version even of the Pentateuch.

Paul didn’t offer a sacrifice to “the unknown god,” but neither did he smash down the altar. He instead explained to the Athenians who that “unknown god” is.

Perhaps Matt 6:16-18 would also be relevant?