TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING THE REALITY OF ONENESS OF GOD: [TAWHEED] (IN SEARCH OF THE TRUTH Book 1)

Now this is eternal life: This statement in the Bible is devastating to the doctrine of the Trinity, as it clearly identifies God as the only true God to the exclusion of Jesus.

Tawheed versus Trinity: Which is the True Concept of God – Part 1. – Many Prophets, One Message

In fact so devastating is this statement, that major pro-Trinitarian scholars of the past have resorted to manipulating the Bible in order to protect the doctrine of the Trinity. We note the remarkable comment of the celebrated Church Father Augustine. It was so difficult for Augustine to harmonise John This daring alteration of the Bible seriously distorts the original meaning of the words in order to include Jesus in the Godhead. You can read more examples of how Trinitarians misinterpret scripture here. The simple fact is that nowhere in the Bible is there any explicit mention of a Trinitarian formula, the concept that God is three persons that are co-equal and co-eternal.

The Trinity is supposed to be the central doctrine of Christianity and the true nature of God, and yet the Bible does not clearly support it.

This silence becomes deafening when we consider the many historical controversies that are discussed in the New Testament. The Book of Acts is filled with many examples of controversies that occurred during the lifetime of the disciples. Perhaps the most prominent of these was the issue of circumcision in light of Gentiles. With the sudden influx of new Gentile converts, the question of whether they need to be circumcised was raised. Chapter 15 of the Book of Acts goes into detail about a council that was summoned in Jerusalem, with church leaders like James and Peter attending to settle the controversy.

Now imagine the disciples going into synagogues and teaching a new Triune concept of God that would have been alien to these strictly monotheistic Jews. The truth is that this doctrine is arrived at by deduction. In doing so they reduce the Bible to a Da Vinci Code. The following example is perhaps the most noteworthy:. One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating.

The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbour as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.

The things that God revealed to humanity were not all given at once. His revelation was given in stages… Progressive revelation means that God did not unfold His entire plan to humanity in the Book of Genesis or, for that matter, in the entire Old Testament. The Old Testament revelation, though accurate, is incomplete.

The fullness of certain teachings cannot be found in the Old Testament [6]. But such an appeal creates more problems that it attempts to solve. Therefore the question they have to ponder is, what if God later reveals He is Four Persons united in One? This central theme, the worship of God who is unlike His creation, is reinforced using so many different types of argument.

He neither begets nor is born, Nor is there to Him any equivalent.

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7. Tawhid in Sufism.

If divine nature has always been part of the 1 person, then was the human nature always part of the one person who has divine nature? So did the person who had eternal divine nature remember no human nature BEFORE experience as divine person human nature. The divinity must have experienced human weakness. If we look during the time of prophet Moses a. Such idolatry act was due to them mixing with foreign cultures. Without the monitoring of prophet Jesus due to him no longer being on earth, and decades later falsehood certainly occurs.

An Israelite from Tarsus being a Hellenistic region can also easily believe in gods in heaven that looks like humans, with the supreme god being an old man with white beard who came to earth to impregnate women so that the women can bear sons of god to become savior for mankind. As such were the case before during the time of prophet Moses, the Israelites easily believe in idol worshiping. With such Hellenistic upbringing, when Romans or even Hellenistic Jews read the the book of Genesis1.

They use a teleological argument for the existence of God as a creator based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, design, or direction—or some combination of these—in nature. Teleology is the supposition that there is a purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature. Another argument which is used frequently by theologians is Reductio ad absurdum. They use it instead of positive arguments as a more efficient way to reject the ideas of opponents. Against the polytheism of pre-Islamic Arabia , the Qur'an argues that the knowledge of God as the creator of everything rules out the possibility of lesser gods since these beings must be themselves created.

For the Qur'an, God is an immanent and transcendent deity who actively creates, maintains and destroys the universe. The reality of God as the ultimate cause of things is the belief that God is veiled from human understanding because of the secondary causes and contingent realities of things in the world. The Qur'an states that God's signals are so near and yet so far, demanding that its students listen to what it has to say with humility Sura The Qur'an draws attention to certain observable facts, to present them as "reminders" of God instead of providing lengthy "theological" proofs for the existence and unity of God.

Ash'ari theologians rejected cause and effect in essence, but accepted it as something that facilitates humankind's investigation and comprehension of natural processes. These medieval scholars argued that nature was composed of uniform atoms that were "re-created" at every instant by God. The laws of nature were only the customary sequence of apparent causes customs of God , the ultimate cause of each accident being God himself. An ontological argument for the existence of God was first proposed by Avicenna in the Metaphysics section of The Book of Healing [26] [27] Other forms of the argument also appear in Avicenna's other works, and this argument became known as the Proof of the Truthful.

Avicenna initiated a full-fledged inquiry into the question of being , in which he distinguished between essence Mahiat and existence Wujud. He argued that the fact of existence can not be inferred from or accounted for by the essence of existing things and that form and matter by themselves cannot interact and originate the movement of the universe or the progressive actualization of existing things.

Existence must, therefore, be due to an agent-cause that necessitates, imparts, gives, or adds existence to an essence. To do so, the cause must be an existing thing and coexist with its effect. This was the first attempt at using the method of a priori proof , which utilizes intuition and reason alone.

Avicenna's proof of God's existence is unique in that it can be classified as both a cosmological argument and an ontological argument. The proof is also "cosmological insofar as most of it is taken up with arguing that contingent existents cannot stand alone and must end up in a Necessary Existent". According to Avicenna, the universe consists of a chain of actual beings, each giving existence to the one below it and responsible for the existence of the rest of the chain below.

Because an actual infinite is deemed impossible by Avicenna, this chain as a whole must terminate in a being that is wholly simple and one, whose essence is its very existence, and therefore is self-sufficient and not in need of something else to give it existence.

Rumi's Masnavi, part 6: Unity of being

Because its existence is not contingent on or necessitated by something else but is necessary and eternal in itself, it satisfies the condition of being the necessitating cause of the entire chain that constitutes the eternal world of contingent existing things. There is a gradual multiplication of beings through a timeless emanation from God as a result of his self-knowledge. The Qur'an argues that there can be no multiple sources of divine sovereignty since "behold, each god would have taken away what [each] had created, And some would have Lorded it over others!

The Qur'an in verse Later Muslim theologians elaborated on this verse saying that the existence of at least two gods would inevitably arise between them, at one time or another, a conflict of wills. Since two contrary wills could not possibly be realized at the same time, one of them must admit himself powerless in that particular instance. On the other hand, a powerless being can not by definition be a god. Therefore, the possibility of having more than one god is ruled out.

The Qur'an argues that human beings have an instinctive distaste for polytheism: At times of crisis, for example, even the idolaters forget the false deities and call upon the one true God for help. As soon as they are relieved from the danger, they however start associating other beings with God. Next, the Qur'an argues that polytheism takes away from human dignity: God has honored human beings and given them charge of the physical world, and yet they disgrace their position in the world by worshipping what they carve out with their own hands.

Lastly, the Qur'an argues that monotheism is not a later discovery made by the human race, but rather there is the combined evidence of the prophetic call for monotheism throughout human history starting from Adam. The Qur'an suggests several causes for deviation from monotheism to polytheism: Great temporal power, regarded by the holder and his subjects as 'absolute' — may lead the holder to think that he is God-like; such claims were commonly forced upon, and accepted by, those who were subject to the ruler.

Also, certain natural phenomena such as the sun, the moon and the stars inspire feelings of awe, wonder or admiration that could lead some to regard these celestial bodies as deities. Another reason for deviation from monotheism is when one becomes a slave to his or her base desires and passions. In seeking to always satisfy the desires, he or she may commit a kind of polytheism.

Understanding of the meaning of Tawhid is one of the most controversial issues among Muslims. Islamic scholars have different approaches toward understanding it, comprising textualistic approach , theological approach , philosophical approach and Sufism and Irfani approach. These different approaches lead to different and in some cases opposite understanding of the issue.

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The Textualistists by reason of their conception of the divine Attributes, came to represent the divinity as a complex of names and qualifications alongside the divine essence itself. The Athari methodology of textual interpretation is to avoid delving into extensive theological speculation. Certain theologians use the term Tawhid in a much broader meaning to denote the totality of discussion of God, his existence and his various attributes.

Others go yet further and use the term to ultimately represent the totality of the "principles of religion". In its current usage, the expressions "Tawhid" or "knowledge of Tawhid" are sometimes used as an equivalent for the whole Kalam, the Islamic theology. According to Sunni Islam, the orthodox understanding of theology is taken directly from the teachings of Muhammad with the understanding and methodology of his companions, sourced directly from the revealed scripture the Qur'an ; being the main information source for understanding the oneness of God in Islam.

All Muslim authorities maintain that a true understanding of God is impossible unless He introduces Himself due to the fact that God is beyond the range of human vision and senses. According to this view, the fundamental message of all of the prophets is: The Mu'tazilis liked to call themselves the men of the tawhid ahl al-tawhid.

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God is unique, nothing is like him; he is neither body, nor individual, nor substance, nor accident. He is beyond time. He cannot dwell in a place or within a being; he is not the object of any creatural attribute or qualification. He is neither conditioned nor determined, neither engendered nor engendering. He is beyond the perception of the senses. The eyes cannot see him, observation cannot attain him, the imagination cannot comprehend him. He is a thing, but he is not like other things; he is omniscient, all-powerful, but his omniscience and his all-mightiness cannot be compared to anything created.

God and truth

He created the world without any pre-established archetype and without an auxiliary. According to Henry Corbin , the result of this interpretation is the negation of the divine attributes, the affirmation of the created Quran, and the denial of all possibility of the vision of God in the world beyond. The solution proposed by Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari to solve the problems of tashbih and ta'til concedes that the divine Being possesses in a real sense the Attributes and Names mentioned in the Qur'an.

Insofar as these Names and Attributes have a positive reality, they are distinct from the essence, but nevertheless they do not have either existence or reality apart from it. The inspiration of al-Ash'ari in this matter was on the one hand to distinguish essence and attribute as concepts, and on the other hand to see that the duality between essence and attribute should be situated not on the quantitative but on the qualitative level—something which Mu'tazilis thinking had failed to grasp.

Ash'ari theology, which dominated Sunni Islam from the tenth to the nineteenth century, insists on ultimate divine transcendence and holds that divine unity is not accessible to human reason. Ash'arism teaches that human knowledge regarding it is limited to what was has been revealed through the prophets, and on such questions as God's creation of evil and the apparent anthropomorphism of God's attributes, revelation has to accepted bila kayfa without [asking] how. Twelvers theology is based on the Hadith which have been narrated from the Islamic prophet Muhammad , the first , fifth , sixth , seventh and eighth Imams and compiled by Shia scholars such as Al-Shaykh al-Saduq in al-Tawhid.

Any suggestion of these attributes and names being conceived of as separate is thought to entail polytheism. It would be even incorrect to say God knows by his knowledge which is in his essence but God knows by his knowledge which is his essence. Therefore one must slay the self, that individuated ego that separates us from our source, the reed-bed from which the reed flute plaintively laments at the very opening of the Masnavi. But if you have two discerning eyes and are not afflicted by double-vision, you will see that everything in this world and the hereafter is actually the beloved Masnavi 6: Everything is the beloved, and the lover blocks our line-of-sight by creating an illusionary separation of subject and object; the beloved is living, uncontingent, while the lover is a corpse 1: This unity of being is as true for the relationship of believer to believer, as it is for the individual soul to God:.

This theology of love demands purification, peeling off the layers of the lover's baser self, to the point that the lover's distinct will and identity is effaced, and only the beloved remains. When the traces of the selfish self nafs are effaced, pure soulful self remains, immortal and united with the divine, like a candle whose light fades away with the sunrise.

For this reason, the Sufis have urged the wayfarer to "Die before you die" a tradition Rumi treats at length in Masnavi 6: Rumi gives several humorous parables to illustrate, including this: A man knocks at his friend's door. When he returns a year later and knocks again, he responds to "Who is it? Any true dervish has been effaced in this manner 3: Ironically, then, by dying one gains life. The parable of the three fish which tale Robbi Robb of Tribe after Tribe and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam performed on a album called Three Fish illustrates how the fish that flails about trying to save itself draws attention to itself and is caught by fishermen, whereas the fish that feigned to be carrion — dying before death — did not fall prey to the net Masnavi 4: As Rumi argues, this dying to self is actually a metamorphosis, a birth that transforms us to a higher state:.