Is God one and the same across all believers, or is “God” a construct shaped by theological lenses? Calvinists believe in a Jesus that died for the elected and that God’s grace is irresistible. They also believe that those who will be condemned to hell have already been determined. Arminians believe that grace can be resisted, although Jesus’ salvation is “for all” and can be “obtained”.

Many Baptists are cessationists who believe that God no longer speaks through spiritual gifts. But Charismatics and Pentecostals disagree by affirming that God continues to speak through visions, tongues, prophecies, and discernment until the present. Roman Catholics believe in a Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son whereas Eastern Orthodox Catholics believe that the Spirit only proceeds from the Father. 

Mainstream Christianity believes in supersessionism, or the idea that the new covenant replaced the old covenant whereas Messianic Jews believe in a dual covenant theology wherein the old covenant is co-active with the new covenant. They also uphold that the former still applies to Jews whereas the latter applies only to Gentiles.

Which of all of them is correct about God? 

Many Protestants claim that they worship the same god, with the main differences lying in their theologies about the nature of salvation, eschatology, spiritual gifts, methods of worshipping, etc. But they all agree in the identity of God since they all believe in the Holy Trinity. And they would even say the same thing with Roman and Eastern Orthodox Catholics. Except of course, towards those who deny and reject the Holy Trinity since it is directly at odds with the identity of God. Their theological differences, however, imply that they do not speak coherently about who God is.  

According to Leibniz’s Identity of Indiscernibles, if x and y are identical, then whatever is true of x must also be true of y. So, if two entities differ even in just one property or attribute, they are not the same entity. If we follow this line of reasoning, it then follows that the god of the Arminians is not identical to the god of the Calvinists nor is the god of the cessationists identical with the god of the continuationists. The god of the supersessionists is not the same as the god of the dual covenant theologians.

All of these differ in at least one property about God.  So, in essence, all Christians have different versions of God and thereby, all of them do not worship the same god because there is at least one property of the version of their gods that the other either does not share or that these properties are contradictory with one another.

Two contradicting ideas cannot be both true at the same time. We cannot say, for example, that the hamster is not in the cage when it is in fact in the cage. Similarly, we cannot coherently claim that God speaks through visions and prophecies if in fact, he no longer does. We cannot say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son if in fact, he only proceeds from the Father. We cannot say that God has two separate covenants for Jews and Gentiles if he in fact already replaced the old with the new. We cannot say that God has already determined who is saved and condemned if we also claim that God gave the freedom for humanity to determine their salvation through faith. The grace of God is either resistible or irresistible; they cannot be both true at the same time.

This problem deepens when we recognize that many contemporary Christian conceptions of God in various sects of Christianity is no longer identical to and diverge significantly from how God was originally envisioned by the ancient Israelites drawn from a polytheistic pantheon of Ugaritic-Canaanite religion where Yahweh (whom we know as God the Father in Christianity) is understood to be one of the many deities that was born of El and Athirat even prior to the Bible we know today.

If these theological portraits assign incompatible properties to God, then by Leibniz’s logic, they cannot all refer to the same divine being.

One might object that Christians may simply be mistaken about certain attributes of God while God’s identity itself remains unchanged. Yet this response misses the point. Even if we suppose that there is a single “true” God behind these traditions, believers are not worshipping that God as such – what they are worshipping is their own constructed versions of this god. Each denomination relates to a distinct conceptual God defined by a unique cluster or combination of properties that other sects either deny or directly contradict. In practice, each sect or believer has a different version of God that is not identical with the other which means that all of them do not worship the same god.

Either only one of these theological accounts is correct and the rest is wrong, or none of them is right about God. And if none of them is, then what these theological contradictions or inconsistencies reveal is not a mysterious god that is beyond all understanding, but something far more human: here is a God fractured by interpretive error, shaped by cultural inheritance, and constrained by the limits of human reason. In this light, God begins to look less like an eternal, self-consistent, unchanging being and more like a construct plagued by flaws due to man’s errors in reasoning – an invented god of contradictions resulting from the imperfections of human imagination.