Ismail Faruqi on the Trinity
Dr. Isma’il al-Faruqi wrote the following on the Trinity:
The offense of Christianity against transcendence was even greater. Islam charged Christianity with extending the nontranscendent concept to God’s “fatherhood of the Jewish kings” to Jesus and giving it, besides its moral signification of compliance with God’s commandments, the de-transcendentalizing ontological connotation of unity of substance between God and Jesus. Indeed, Christian catholicity defined itself with terms of this “substantial” identity of Jesus with God, as distinct from plurality of their “personalities,” characters and consciousness. Obviously, the source of this new departure from transcendence of the divine being within the Semitic stream was not the Jewish inheritance of Christianity. This had given Christianity the concepts, not their connotation. Neither was gnosticism the source of that departure, whose argument “If he suffer, he was not God; if he was God, he did not suffer” was hurled against their fellow Christians in defence of transcendence. The source must be the non-Semitic influence of the “mystery religions.” It was from this source that Christianity derived its “suffering God” who saves by dying and returning to life and whose mana (grace) is imparted to the communicant thought sacrament.