Muslims, Christians and God's Wife.

It is important that I address this.

Among the things termed haram (wrong, illegal) by Islamic canon is any and all claims that God married a woman (and had a child by her). This is all very well, and is followed by a certain denounciation of those who hold this belief to be kaffirs who are somehow divested of their right to exist 1.

Interestingly, they lump all Christians under this description and use it rather vehemently to attack them.

I do not know where they got this idea, but I suspect Roman Catholics have not helped matters by praying to Mary which gives her a status equivalent to that of God and then going to Palestine (the Crusades) to beat Muslims and thus raising their desire for revenge.

As a Christian who believes what the Bible says, and having read through it completely, I can tell you without a shred of doubt that nowhere is it written or implied in that same Bible that God married a (literal, to be clear) woman. Why would he need to when He claims to be able to:

  1. Do anything.
  2. Do anything He wants.
  3. Enter your small heart (mind) and stay there and not just you, but everybody else.

What the Bible and by extension Christians acknowledge is that the God of Abraham who made people from mud with his own hands also has the power to - and did - make a body for His son using machinery he already made - a female virgin Hebrew, a woman who also happened to be the Arabs' cousin - and the child subsequently got born.

Needing to have sex to have a child would seriously limit God and is a betrayal of their belief in the all-powerful God they inherited from Abraham who made everything and their own Qur'an which acknowledges the virgin birth. It also makes them liars. 2

Having said all of that, I want to touch on the subject of the woman in the Bible. The Bible in several places refers to Israel as God's wife in several places such as in the books of Ezekiel and Hosea, the church as God's wife in Paul's books and finally to God's people as God's wife in the book of Revelation in the marriage between the bride and the Lamb. This is an obviously symbolic reference, implying the unity between God and His people as a body politic being similar to a marriage between a man and his wife in terms of indissolubility. Marriages are not meant to be broken.



Notes

  1. Or maybe they just read for you fatwa.
  2. I understand that this is a common tactic they use when proselytizing (non-)Christians because they know (non-)Christians do not understand the Bible - or even read it in the first place. A (non-)Christian confronted in this mannes is usually confused, intimidated, convinced or scared by the seemingly infallible logic.