Abstract
Miroslav Volf,
Allah: A Christian Response
, HarperOne: New York, 2011; 336 pp.: 9780061927072, £16.14/$25.99 (hbk), 9780061927089, £9.59/$15.99 (pbk), 9780062041715, £6.99/$9.99 (e-book)
With characteristic clarity of purpose and style, Volf has provided an essential text for anybody who is engaged or interested in one of two key questions facing the religious world today: how Christians and Muslims can live together in mutual respect and growing understanding. Tired of the question ‘Do Christians and Muslims believe in the same God?’, posed at innumerable lectures, Volf sets out to affirm that they do, with a detailed discussion of the recent A Common Word between Us and You published in October 2007 by the most prominent and representative Muslim leaders in the world in response to a critique of Islam by Pope Benedict XVI. A Common Word asserted that the injunction to love God and to love one’s neighbour is common to both religions, despite other differences between them. Volf explores what this might mean.
He takes us back to Nicholas of Cusa (who advocated dialogue instead of crusade in the fifteenth century) and to Martin Luther, both of whom engaged theologically with the challenge of Islam that Christianity is polytheistic. In a detailed and careful exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity, and an investigation of what it means to say that ‘God is love’, Volf takes his Christian readership back to theological basics. He writes carefully, obviously in close contact with Muslim scholars, both theological and legal, encouraging Christians to think more deeply about their own faith so that engagement between the two religions is based on the search for truth. He usefully differentiates between the ‘normative’ adherence to either religion within a range of belief and practice in each.
Volf does not avoid the hard questions – of the relationship of religion and politics and how a state can allow, even nurture, plurality and freedom of religion; the challenge that Islam is coercive and violent; how religion can be used as an identity marker by extremists. Throughout, he is directing his words to Christians, prompting them into self-examination for the sake of greater understanding, but never at the expense of the truth of the Christian’s understanding of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Using the tag that inter-religious dialogue begins with the hands, then goes to the heart, and then to the head, Volf provides food for those hungry for intellectual engagement with their Muslim friends. He boldly claims that the fear of God is essential: that Muslim and Christian should turn to God and ‘affirm together that no other thing – no culture, no nation, and yes, not even religion – is God. God alone is God – the common God of Christians and Muslims, whom they both understand in different and yet remarkably similar ways’ (p. 254). Together they have much to tell of God to a world seduced by empty pleasure – which is the second key question facing the religious world today.
As often is the case, sustained and thoughtful contact with Muslims provokes the Christian into greater depth of reading about her own faith. Volf supplies just the book required. He writes for Christians, but with Muslims as a significant secondary audience. To encourage Muslim friends to read alongside Christians would be a leap forward in Christian–Muslim relations.