Prof. Mansur says: we are in the presence of the Infinite, only limited by our capacity to comprehend this presence which surrounds, penetrates and sustains us as fragments of the totality of creation.
But the god of Judaism or Christianity is not the “presence of the Infinite”. Hashem is specific: the G-d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If this being is real, he is so because he has revealed himself as being in covenant with a particular people.
Christianity then claims that this G-d has also revealed himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, who raised him from the dead. Whether the Christian claims–either as to Jesus’ purported resurrection, or to the continuity between the Father of Jesus Christ and Hashem–is justified, is not on point.
What is on point is the conclusion that both the G-d of the Jews and of Christians is a specific diety, a being linked to a people, a history, an embodied identity (either in the Jewish people, or in Jesus Christ).
So is the God of the Quran identical to either Hashem or the Father of Jesus Christ? If what Prof. Mansur says is a valid presentation of the Quran, then the answer must be no.
The critique of Islam in Franz Rosenzweig’ The Star of Redemption remains valid: Islam is a monistic paganism, a conglomeration of all the attributes of diety, but separated from space and time, from the lived experience of divine revelation and redemption in the here and now.
Put another way: the Quran postulates a universal diety, which it thinks is the same God as Hashem and the Father of Jesus Christ, but is simply Infinitude hypostatized.
