Theology

Islam and Christianity share much in common but also much that is different. The evidence of interactions between them go right back to the origins of Islam in the seventh century. In early Muslim traditions, Jesus was largely presented as an ascetic, whereas their prophet Muhammad was presented as a political and military ruler; Christianity as a quietist faith and Islam as conquering faith-polity. These early traditions possibly informed the rather oppositional South Asian debates of the nineteenth century. We know that the Muslim conceptions of Jesus have been changing over time. To what extent has the image of Muhammad among Christians changed over time is also a relevant question. Muhammad and Christ were unquestionably often the focal points of the Christian Muslim debates in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century South Asia. Preliminary enquiry of sources suggest that Christians largely looked at Christ and Muhammad as fundamentally opposing characters belonging to different domains; their Muslim counterparts attempted to argue that Muhammad and Christ had much in common and, that Muhammad was in fact the very fulfilment of Christ’s own prophecy. This paper digs both into Muslim (religious doctors) and Christian (missionaries/converts) sources: i. to bring to light a new context of debates (South Asia) on Christ and Muhammad; ii. To examine how Jesus and Muhammad were portrayed in these debates and; iii. To what extent, this South Asian evidence on how Jesus and Muhammad are seen aligns with what we know from writings about them from the Middle Eastern context?

Abstract.  This paper asserts that Continuing Education aimed at equipping Christian leaders (lay and ordained) to carry out their ministries in the midst of America's increasing religious diversity in a way that views this diversity positively must be two-pronged: (1) it must provide accurate information about the beliefs and practices of the neighbors, and (2) it must provide theological resources rooted in Christian scripture and tradition. As this paper explores a variety of models, it reflects on the difficulty of holding these two goals together and the problems inherent in attempting to measure what such Continuing Education programs and events accomplish. In considering ways forward, it offers a Christian theology of religious difference informed by notions of neighbor-love.

Having gotten our attention by recounting a rape in a Chicago train station, Michael Cook uses the incident and bystander responses to define the topic of Forbidding Wrong in Islam: there is “a broad moral consensus” that when one is in the presence of behavior that is patently ...

In Toward Our Mutual Flourishing: The Episcopal Church, Interreligious Relations, and Theologies of Religious Manyness, the author tells the story of The Episcopal Church’s development of an official rationale for its ongoing engagement with religious diversity. At once a work of historical, moral, and practical theology, this volume contextualizes and explains what one church teaches about how religious difference may be interpreted in Christian terms. Through guided reading of noteworthy documents, this book explores such themes as this church’s preference for ecumenical interfaith work, its particular attention to Christian-Jewish and Christian-Muslim concerns, the relationship between missiology and theological understanding of religious diversity, and the intersection of interreligious relations with other ecclesial concerns – peace and justice activism, liturgical reform efforts, and what it means to be «the Body of Christ» in the twenty-first century. The author thus positions this multinational, multicultural, multilingual denomination within the Interfaith Movement, the Anglican theological tradition, and the various schemes for analyzing Christian theologies of religions. About The Episcopal Church (but not just for Episcopalians), about Christianity (but not just for Christians), this book is an excellent resource for courses in interreligious dialogue, Christian ethics, and American religious history.