Tag: Language

Can the Name of Allah Be Used for the Christian God?

Short answer: It depends.

Long answer:

First, some historical background. There were Arab Christians before the emergence of Islam that used Allah to refer to the Christian God. These were Arab tribes such as the Lakhmids, the Banu Taghlib, and the Ghassanids who lived on the borders of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires. In fact, one of the oldest sources of written Arabic is a monastery inscription written by Hind, mother of the Lakhmid king, Amr, which reads “This church was built by Hind, mother of King Amr and servant of Christ… May the God for whom she built this church forgiver her sins and have mercy on her son.” Arabic Christians have continued throughout history to use the name Allah to refer to the God of the Bible to the present day. The name Allah is linguistically related to the Aramaic name for God, Alaha, and more importantly, to the Hebrew name, El. So in terms of history and etymology, Allah has a strong case. It has been conveying the meaning of the God of Bible’s identity for at least 1,500 years among Arabic-speaking Christians. Its sister languages have been similarly using its cognates for even longer than that.

But what about Islam? What happens when a rival religion emerges and hijacks the name for God the Christians have been using, filling it with unbiblical meaning? The god the Qur’an describes is vastly different from the God the Bible describes. The god of the Qur’an is a simple unity who is transcendent, but not imminent. The God of the Bible is a complex unity, a Trinity, who is both transcendent and imminent. The nature of the former means he cannot become a man to die a shameful death on a cross for the atonement of sins. The latter did, as the eternal Son took on flesh and became the man, Jesus Christ. Despite this and many other differences, Arab Christians throughout history, including our evangelical brothers and sisters, have held onto the name Allah for God. They are the linguistic insiders, the ones best qualified to know whether the biblical meaning of God can still be communicated by the form, Allah. English speakers should defer to native Arabic speakers, agreeing that within the Arabic language, Allah can be used to speak of the Christian God.

As English speakers, a little reflection on our own word, God, can be helpful here. In spite of its polytheistic Indo-European and Germanic baggage, the name God has been redeemed and filled for a millennium and a half with biblical meaning. Therefore, our own experience tells us that names of deities with pagan baggage can become faithful linguistic servants of the true revelation. Let’s say Mormonism, with its own unbiblical views of God, overtakes Christianity in the West and becomes the dominant religion. Would we abandon the name, God? Unlikely. We would probably labor for thousands of years to refill the form with its biblical meaning, not unlike what Arab Christians have done.

But…

The name Allah should not be used to refer to the God of the Bible outside of Arabic-speaking communities. There are at least three reasons for this.

The first is that Christian history and missions history have shown that whenever possible, Christians should seek to redeem the indigenous word for the all-powerful creator God that already exists in that language, if one exists. Again, we English speakers live this reality every day when we say God instead of YHWH or El. Why has redeeming the chief divinity’s name been so effective throughout history in hundreds of languages? My theory is that the name for the all-powerful creator god in a given language represents an ancient remnant of early monotheism, diluted sometime after Babel into polytheism, but still there, waiting like a time-bomb for a Christian missionary to come along and connect that name back to its source. He has not left them without a witness to himself (Acts 14:17).

The second reason for not using Allah in other linguistic contexts is that Allah primarily represents/means the god of Islam in those other languages, making it more harmful than not to communicating the biblical God. Languages other than Arabic don’t have the broader range of meanings of Allah that Arabic has, in which Allah continues to be used also as the God of Arabic Christians and Jews. These languages often have another name for the all-powerful creator god in addition to the more narrowly-understood Allah proclaimed among them by Islam. This is true of the Muslim Central Asian people group that we work among and many others. Our focus people group, interestingly enough, has a name for God that is a very distant cousin-cognate to our English term, God. When they use this indigenous name, it carries a broader sense than Allah does, thus giving us more room to build biblical categories. We sense this even in English. When someone speaks of Allah we understand that that person is speaking of the god of Islam in a narrower sense than we use the term God in English. Words really do carry around meaning-baggage with them, and we need to acknowledge it and carefully judge if a name is already so tied to unbiblical meaning as to be not worth the salvage effort. In other languages, Allah is not worth the effort it would take to redeem it, especially when God has preserved an indigenous name for the all-powerful creator god in that language.

That brings me to my third reason to not use Allah to refer to the biblical God in non-Arabic contexts. Islam teaches that in order to please God, you must pray, worship, and live like a 7th century Arab. It teaches that Arabic is the language of heaven and thus holier than all other languages. This means that all those other people groups who are Muslim have been raised to believe that their language is inferior for praying to Allah and that they will only get the spiritual merit they need to gain paradise if they pray in 7th century Arabic. In a real sense, they must become Arabs or they will go to hell. Why have the Persians, the Turks, the Kurds, the Berbers, the Dari, the Pashtun, the Baloch, the Somalis, and so many others blindly accepted this linguistic and cultural colonialism? It is tragic that no one has taught them that gentiles don’t need to become Jews in order to be saved, and therefore, they do not have to become Arabs. Missionaries run the risk of contributing to this Arab-supremacist heresy when we thoughtlessly or “creatively” use Allah among non-Arab people groups. Instead, we should be proclaiming that the true God knows their language and knows their people, that he loves them and desires for them to worship him in their own language as a unique manifestation of his glory – that he will even preserve worship in their language for all eternity (Rev 7:9). These truths are precious and powerful for oppressed people groups in a way that dominant people groups (like English and Arabic speakers) sometimes struggle to understand. Yes, the gospel will call them to transcend their ethno-linguistic identity as members of the race of Christ, but first it will honor their ethno-linguistic identity. In salvation, God will come to them and will speak to them in their mother tongue. So should we.

So, can Christians use the name of Allah to refer to the God of the Bible? It depends. If it’s in Arabic, absolutely. In other languages, let’s avoid it wherever possible.

Arab Christian History Source: Baumer, The Church of the East, p. 92

Photo by Rumman Amin on Unsplash

The Oldest Poem in the English Language

My wife bought me Leland Ryken’s The Soul in Paraphrase for a Father’s Day gift. It begins with this gem, the oldest extant poem in the English language, which is fittingly about creation. 

Now we must praise the Keeper of Heaven's Kingdom, 
The might of the Maker and his wisdom, 
The work of the Glory-Father, when he of every wonder, 
The eternal Lord, the beginning established. 

He first created for the sons of earth 
Heaven as a roof, Holy Creator, 
Then middle-earth the Protector of mankind, 
Eternal Lord, afterwards made, 
The earth for men, the Lord Almighty.

The poet is Caedmon, an illiterate English farmhand in the 600s who did not know how to sing. When he fell asleep one day in a barn, someone in a dream told him to sing. Caedmon protested that he did not know how, so the voice told him that he should sing about creation. When he awoke, Caedmon was able to sing this song. Ryken says, “The new poetic gift never left Caedmon. English poetry thus began with a miracle of the word.”

I enjoyed the unique titles that Caedmon uses to speak of God, the “Keeper of Heaven’s Kingdom,” the “Glory-Father,” the “Protector of mankind.” This is one of the advantages of being exposed to the worship of God in other languages or in an archaic form of your own language – different kinds of titles are possible and prominent (For example, Acts 1:24 in Greek calls God “Lord Heart-Knower”). I also noticed how the verbs come at the end of some of the sentences, an old trait of Indo-European languages that has also held on in the Indo-European language we are learning in Central Asia. And I always find it interesting whenever I come across an account from church history where the Holy Spirit communicates in dreams, a phenomenon quite common among those who come to faith in Central Asia. Strange as it might seem to us now, dreams are more common in our own spiritual lineage than we might think.

As I read, I wondered if this first poem of the English language also hints at some influence of Celtic Christianity, the main cultural source of English Christianity, with its Patrick-esque emphasis on the goodness of creation (See this post on St. Patrick’s Breastplate). Like creation, English poetry has since been abused and broken in many ways, but it sure had a good and beautiful beginning.

For the linguistically curious, here is “Caedmon’s Hymn” in Old English and in Bede’s Latin translation. 

Nū scylun hergan hefaenrīcaes Uard,
metudæs maecti end his mōdgidanc,
uerc Uuldurfadur, suē hē uundra gihwaes,
ēci dryctin ōr āstelidæ
hē ǣrist scōp aelda barnum
heben til hrōfe, hāleg scepen.
Thā middungeard moncynnæs Uard,
eci Dryctin, æfter tīadæ
firum foldu, Frēa allmectig.
Nunc laudare debemus auctorem regni caelestis,
potentiam creatoris, et consilium illius
facta Patris gloriae: quomodo ille,
cum sit aeternus Deus, omnium miraculorum auctor exstitit;
qui primo filiis hominum
caelum pro culmine tecti
dehinc terram custos humani generis
omnipotens creavit.

-Ryken, The Soul in Paraphrase, pp. 19-20

-Marsden, Old English Reader, p. 80

-Photo by Stephanie LeBlanc on Unsplash

The English Language Was Saved by a Pandemic

Photo by Kuma Kum on Unsplash

In this time of global pandemic it’s worth recalling that the English language would likely have gone the way of the wooly mammoth had it not been for a pandemic, specifically, the Black Death. In the year 1066, William the conqueror of Normandy and his fellow francophone viking descendants (Norman = Northman = Viking) successfully invaded Britain. The linguistic effect of this conquest was that Norman French became the language of the ruling class of society for the next several hundred years. The Old English (Anglo-Saxon) of Beowulf steadily lost ground to the language of the conquerors, only holding on in the countryside and among the lower classes. The English that remained absorbed an incredible amount of French vocabulary in this period, leading to a distinct stage in the language called Middle English. As the influence of French grew among the upper and middle classes, taking over the cities and all literary endeavors, the future of English was in danger.

Enter the Black Death. This plague which attacked the lymphatic system was spread by fleas, rats, and also by airborne transmission. The Black Death devastated the cities of Europe in the mid-1300s, killing as many as 1/3 of the population. This meant that many of the urbanite French speakers who would have continued to advance the victory of French in Britain were instead killed by the plague. The literati and political class were decimated. This aftermath of the plague gave the English language the chance to not only survive, but to regain prominence in Britain, and eventually, to emerge as the first truly global language. Well, first since Babel anyway.

What might be the linguistic effects of this current Covid-19 pandemic? Certainly it will mean the creation of new vocabulary as concepts such as quarantine and social distancing are translated into the official languages of every country. Our local Central Asian language has coined a new verb: “karantîn” + verb form of make/do. Will the pandemic save an endangered language that will one day go on to rule the world? Unlikely, but as history demonstrates, by no means impossible.

*I’m indebted to Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word and John McWhorter’s Words on the Move for the information in this post – great books if you enjoy the combination of language and history.