Replies

You wrote:

“What you say in #64 in conjunction with the second sentence of the quotation from #129 entails that Jews don’t worship the same God Catholics worship. But what you say in the first sentence of #129 implies that Jews worship the same God Catholics worship. Which is it?”

Oh, I’m sorry. I just re-read what you originally posted and saw that I misread what you wrote. But in that statement you then seem to be saying that Allah is the same as the Trinity. After all, what you wrote about Jews and Yahweh could just as easily said about Muslims and Allah.

Jews do not WORSHIP the Trinity. You do, right? Does that mean you worship a different God than they do?

I think you are trying to collapse a larger issue into a preconceived category of your own making.

I worwhip the Trinity. I rarely if ever refer to God the Father as Yahweh in my prayers or in the Mass. Does that mean I worship a DIFFERENT God than Jews? Or is it that Jews have a deficient understanding of the completeness of God in the Three Persons of the Trinity? Which is it?

Jews worship the one God who is three in person, even though they do not know that the one God they worship is three in Person. Noting the Athenians' altar "To an Unknown God", Paul says, "What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you". (Acts 17:23) This shows that it is possible to worship God while knowing very little about Him. The Jews, of course, knew much more about God than did the Athenians. A fortiori, they too were (and are) worshipping the one true God, even while remaining unaware that He is three in person. Marcion claimed that the God whom the Jews worshipped was a different God than the Father of Jesus. The Church declared Marcion's position a heresy. According to the Church, the God of the Old Testament and the Jews is the Creator of all things and is the Father of Jesus, and the Father whom Christians worship.

The Church also teaches (CCC 841) that the Muslims worship this same God, even though they too do not recognize that God is a trinity of Persons.

-A8