Are God and Allah the Same Guy?

James Talarico managed to condense nearly a thousand years of theological argument into ten words.

During a 2024 podcast appearance, the Texas state representative and Presbyterian seminarian said that “Christians and Muslims and Jews all worship the same God.” He added that Muslims “love Jesus” and pointed to the three religions’ shared connection to Abraham. The clip resurfaced this week in conjunction with his Senate race, drawing fresh criticism.

Set the politics aside, though, and Talarico’s claim presents a fascinating theological problem. The Qur’an itself appears to agree with him. Speaking about Jews and Christians, it instructs Muslims to say, “our God and your God is one.”

Then the Qur’an goes on to deny some of Christianity’s most basic claims about that God.

So what exactly does “same God” mean?

The Qur’an Says Yes

Islam did not emerge claiming that Abraham, Moses and Jesus had worshipped the wrong deity. It claims the opposite.

Qur’an 29:46 tells Muslims discussing faith with Jews and Christians, whom it calls “People of the Book,” that “our God and your God is one.” Elsewhere, the Qur’an presents Abraham, Moses and Jesus as figures in the same long history of divine revelation.

Islam places Muhammad at the end of that same prophetic line. Muslims regard him not as divine, but as God’s final prophet, through whom the Qur’an was revealed. The Qur’an describes itself as confirming earlier scripture while also serving as an authority over it. Christians generally reject both claims: they do not recognize Muhammad as a prophet or the Qur’an as revelation from God.

There are substantial similarities in the descriptions of God, too. Christianity and Islam both teach that there is one sovereign Creator, distinct from creation, who reveals moral commands, judges humanity, shows mercy, answers prayer and will ultimately raise the dead.

Even Jesus occupies much more space in Islam than some Christians may realize. The Qur’an calls Jesus the Messiah, a title meaning “anointed one” and traditionally associated with a divinely chosen deliverer, and a messenger of God. It describes Mary learning that she will have a son despite no man having touched her. Jesus heals the blind and lepers and even raises the dead, although repeatedly “by permission of Allah.”

That all sounds remarkably familiar, until we get to the end.

Same Jesus, Radically Different Story

In Christianity, Jesus is not merely someone through whom God acts. Jesus is God acting in human history.

The Gospel of John identifies Jesus with the divine Word, saying “the Word was God” and later that “the Word became flesh.” The Nicene tradition that defines mainstream Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christianity teaches that God is Trinity, one God existing as three distinct persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus, as the Son, is “true God from true God." Christianity teaches that he bevame human, was crucified, died, and rose again.

Islam draws a bright line through that account.

Qur’an 4:171 calls Jesus the Messiah and a messenger, but warns Christians not to say “Trinity." Elsewhere in the Qur'an, it describes God as absolutely one and says that God “neither begets nor is born.”

The split becomes even more dramatic at the crucifixion.

For Christianity, the death and resurrection of Jesus sit at the center of the faith. The Qur’an says Jesus’ enemies “did not kill him, nor did they crucify him,” and instead says that God raised Jesus to Himself.

The two traditions are therefore not just using different words for the same series of events. They tell fundamentally incompatible stories about what God did in one of the most consequential moments in either religion.

Christianity says God entered creation as Jesus, died on the cross, and rose from death. Islam says God did not become Jesus, does not have a divine Son, and that Jesus was not crucified by his enemies.

If those claims concern the same God, at least one account is badly wrong about what happened. If they concern different gods, the enormous amount of shared history and reference needs another explanation.

Is Allah a Different God?

One shortcut does not work: Muslims worship “Allah,” while Christians worship “God.”

Allah is the Arabic word used for God, including by Arabic-speaking Christians. Arabic Christian worship and Scripture use the word too. The vocabulary does not tell us whether the theology refers to the same divine being.

That leaves identity rather than language.

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf has argued that Christians and Muslims who follow the mainstream teachings of their traditions are referring to the same being when they pray. “The referent is the same,” he told Christianity Today. “The description of God is partly different.”

The late Christian apologist Nabeel Qureshi, who was raised Muslim before converting to Christianity, reached the opposite conclusion. “We worship a triune God, and I think the Trinity makes all the difference,” he argued.

That disagreement gets to the heart of the issue. Is the Trinity a fact about the God Muslims misunderstand, or is being triune so essential to God’s identity that denying it means worshipping someone else entirely?

Then What About Judaism?

There is an awkward test for the second argument: Judaism.

Judaism also rejects the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus. Mainstream Jewish traditions do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah or as divine, and he has no central role in Jewish theology or worship.Judaism has no doctrinal teaching denying Jesus’ crucifixion in the way Islam does, and his execution by the Romans is generally accepted as a historical event. Mainstream Judaism does not, however, accept the Christian claims that Jesus rose from the dead or that his death had redemptive significance.

Yet Christianity explicitly understands itself as worshipping the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. Jesus himself was Jewish and prayed to the God worshipped by Jews around him.

Volf uses exactly this comparison. If rejecting the Trinity necessarily means identifying a different God, he asks, would Christians also have to say Jews worship a different God?

Catholic teaching gives a particularly clear answer. The Catechism describes the God of the Old Covenant as the same God Christians worship, while the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate says Muslims “adore the one God.”

That does not make the three religions interchangeable. Judaism, Christianity and Islam make incompatible claims about revelation, prophecy, Jesus and salvation. A person can believe two traditions are referring to the same being while also believing one of them is badly mistaken about that being.

Other Christian theologians draw the boundary differently. They argue that Christianity’s relationship to Judaism is unique because Christians inherited the Hebrew Scriptures and understand the New Testament as the continuation of that same covenant history. Islam arrives centuries later with a separate claimed revelation that contradicts Christian claims about Jesus. On that view, similarities of names and stories do not establish a shared object of worship.

Christians Have Been Arguing About This for Centuries

The “same God” position is much older than modern interfaith politics.

In 1076, Pope Gregory VII wrote to the Muslim ruler al-Nasir in North Africa that Christians and Muslims should show one another special charity because “we believe in and confess one God, admittedly, in a different way.” The letter came less than two decades before the First Crusade.

The Catholic Church formalized similar language centuries later. Nostra Aetate, issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, says Muslims “adore the one God,” while simultaneously noting that they revere Jesus as a prophet rather than acknowledging him as God.

American public figures have repeatedly rediscovered how contentious that wording remains.

In 2007, President George W. Bush told Al Arabiya that “the God that the Muslim prays to is the same God that I pray to,” pointing to Abraham. Some Christians publicly objected.

In 2015, Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins made the same claim while announcing that she would wear a hijab during Advent in solidarity with Muslims. The evangelical college suspended her and eventually initiated termination proceedings, saying her theological statements appeared inconsistent with its statement of faith. Wheaton later withdrew the termination process, and Hawkins left under a confidential mutual separation agreement.

Now Talarico has stepped into the same argument.

For Universal Life Church ministers serving people across religious traditions, the distinction has practical relevance. Saying that another faith directs worship toward the same God does not require pretending its teachings are identical. Saying that its theology is wrong does not automatically answer whether its believers intend to worship a different deity.

The dispute ultimately asks how we identify someone we cannot see. Is God identified by the Creator whom worshippers intend to address, by a shared historical tradition, by particular divine attributes, or by the specific acts and revelations a religion says God has performed?

If Christians and Muslims both point toward the Creator of Abraham but tell irreconcilable stories about who that Creator is and what happened to Jesus, where would you draw the line between a different understanding of the same God and worship of a different God?