There is at least one thing in common between Christianity and Judaism: monotheism. However, not everyone will agree with that. To many, Christianity’s claim that it is a monotheistic religion is at the very least a mix-up of categories. You cannot say that you worship only one God, but then define it in such a way that strains the definition to the max. The doctrine of the Trinity seems to be a way that Christians found to have their cake and eat it too.

But when we talk about monotheism, what are we really referring to? Are we certain that the way we’ve come to understand monotheism is the same way Jews and Christians understood it in the 1st century? That’s the main question James McGrath, associate professor of Religion at Butler University (see his blog Exploring our Matrix), poses to us in his book The Only True God. Simply assuming that the way we define monotheism today and the way it was defined two thousand years ago is a huge fallacy. We need to set aside our understanding of monotheism and let the texts that we have from that period define the term for us.

At first, I thought this was going to be a defense of Christian monotheism, showing that what people thought about the one true God was in line with later Christian doctrine. But what McGrath wants to remind us is that the worldview of the Jews and early Christians allowed for certain things that were later extrapolated (my word, not McGrath’s) in Christianity and suppressed in Judaism as a way to contain its new definition of monotheism. The result is that neither quite formulated its understanding of the oneness of God as was perceived early on.
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