CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - "Go, therefore," Jesus tells his apostles--and through his apostles his whole Church--"and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit."  (Matt. 28:19).  As this Scripture shows, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was part of the Christian Gospel from the very beginning.

In prior articles on the antichrist in Muhammad, we have briefly viewed the Scriptural texts that reveal God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The Church, during the course of addressing the various Christological and Pneumatological heresies, eventually defined the dogma of the Holy Trinity as the accurate expression of the divine revelation.

As clearly set forth in the Athanasian Creed:  "The Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity . . . . For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit . . . . So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; and yet they are not three Gods, but one God."

We have seen how Muhammad's supposed revelations in the Qur'an rejected God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  Implicitly, the Holy Trinity is rejected by these several Muhammadan rejections.  Muhammad's Allah crowded out the Holy Trinity, and Muhammad placed upon his followers the obligation of upholding an uncompromising monotheism, tawhid, the strict and severe--even monomaniacal--belief in the oneness and uniqueness of Allah.

Tawhid is a doctrine motivated by fear, not by love, and it leads to a heresy by overemphasis of one truth at the negation of another truth.  Just like the Arabs seem to have a horror vacui, a horror of empty spaces, in their art, so Muhammad seems to have developed a horror polytheismi, a horror of polytheism, in his brain.  And it colored, or perhaps better tainted, his understanding of the Most High God.

I use the word monomaniacal because the exclusion of Trinity from Allah did not result in a belief of greater unity or uniqueness in God, a belief which Christianity shares with Islam.  The truth of God's unity and uniqueness, of His transcendence of all created categories, is not better preserved in Islam than in Christianity (though the Muslim, following from his misunderstanding of the Trinity, naturally disagrees). 

What Muhammad's monomaniacal theology did result in, however, was a lonely Allah, an eternally loveless Allah, even an impersonal Allah. 

To use the words of the Fides Dasmasi, Christians believe that "God is one," as much as the Muslim believes that Allah is one, but they also believe that this one God is not "solitary."  God cannot be solitary, for if he is, then God cannot be Personal, nor can he be Love.

As the young theologian Joseph Ratzinger explained in his Introduction to Christianity (written before he was Pope):  "The unrelated, unrelatable, absolutely one," such as Muslims maintain Allah is, "could not be a person." 

"There is no such thing as a person in the categorical singular," Ratzinger explains.  "This is already apparent in the words in which the concept of person grew up; the Greek word 'prosopon' means literally '(a) look towards'; with the prefix 'pros' (toward) it includes the notion of relatedness as an integral part of itself.  To this extent the overstepping of the singular is implicit in the concept of person."

For the Christian faith, God does not become personal upon the creation of the world.  God does not need the relatedness of the world to be personal.  This means that God must have an eternal relatedness within Him that is independent of creation, that exists eternally in God before creation.

This eternal relatedness within God is what makes it possible not only for God to be personal, but for God to be eternally Love.

Nowhere in the Qur'an do we find the sublime evangelical concept that God is Trinity or that "God is love" (1 John 4:16), and this is because, as G. K. Chesterton perceptively stated in his book The Everlasting Man, the Christian "barren dogma" of the Holy Trinity is nothing but the dogmatic expression of the evangelical truth, the "beautiful sentiment," that "God is Love." 

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