Many Christians are confused about how followers of Jesus in Islamic cultural contexts should refer to God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Should they use names whose form is taken from the Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Greek of the New, or should they deploy Arabic forms, which are familiar in their culture but may be distinctively Islamic? Should they, like many Arabic speaking Christians and Malay Christians, refer to God as “Allah”? Should they, like most Iranian Christians, call Jesus “Isa”? Should they, also like Iranian Christians, refer to the Holy Spirit using a Qur’anic expression (ruhol ghodos)?
What principles should guide such decisions? The answers have implications for evangelism, for discipleship, for Bible translation, for ecumenical fellowship, and for peaceful coexistence. This is a challenging question, on which people can come to opposite conclusions, generating divisive disagreement.
This turns out to be quite a tricky question, with an interesting history. As it happens, both “Allah” and “Isa” were in use among Arabs in pre-Islamic times, and we know a lot more about this topic now than even a decade ago because of remarkable advances in the study of pre-Islamic Arabic rock inscriptions.
But for Christians this is not just a question about the history of words: it is an vital issue for living faith in the One whose name, for Christian believers, is above all other names (Philippians 2:9).
You can read my current views on this in an article which is available here for download.
I have given up.
Nothing ?