Miroslav Volf: Allah

Miroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian Response (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 314 pages, ISBN 9780061927072.

Volf, the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School, dedicates this book¹: “To my father, a Pentecostal minister who admired Muslims, and taught me as a boy that they worship the same God as we do.” Growing up as a Pentecostal PK (pastor’s kid) myself in a Muslim dominated environment (West Malaysia), I can’t say I heard too many similar sentiments. Rather, even if there were not aggressive efforts to evangelize our Muslim neighbors (it was illegal to do so), there was still a sense that they were of a different, inferior, and non-salvific religion and needed the gospel, all the more so since they had been blinded by the darkness of Islamic teachings regarding God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

Well Volf’s new book, written first and foremost to Christians (and only secondarily for Muslims), will challenge Pentecostals to revisit these questions. He is clear about not wanting to take up the issue of eschatological salvation (a strategic decision about which I will further comment on later), choosing to focus instead both on the question of whether or not Christians can affirm that they worship the same God as Muslims, and, given his positive response to that query, what the political, social, and ethical implications of that claim might be. The argument unfolds in four parts.

Part I provides historical perspective on both sides of the two-fold thrust of Volf’s discussion. It begins with the contemporary controversy stirred up by Benedict XVI’s remarks regarding violence being at the root of the Islamic religion, the Muslim response, “A Common Word Between Us and You,” an open letter addressed to Christian leaders but particularly to the Pope, and the “Yale Response” that the latter generated. Chapters 2 and 3 then return to Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa’s (1401-64) fairly sophisticated theological proposal that Islam and Christianity are possibly two versions of the same faith and to Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) ironic insistence on the superiority of Christianity as a religion of grace and divine love, which did not lead to his acting as graciously or charitably toward the Turks as his vision of the gospel demanded.

Part II unpacks the important methodological issues approaching the major theological question of the book. Volf insists that practices are just as important as beliefs in this case. The latter argument turns on the logic of monotheism—that there is only one good Creator God who is radically different than all that is not God and who commands that we love God with all our being and our neighbors as ourselves (these are the twists that Volf brings to the discussion)—while the former delineates the multiple possibilities that can pertain: that on the one hand we can believe in the right God (whose attributes are summarized in the parenthetical statement above) but yet live wrongly or even give our allegiances to false gods, and on the other hand we can believe (in our understanding) in the wrong God but yet through our lives demonstrate loyalty to the true God by being faithful to that God’s values. Volf rightly puts his finger on the double-sided aspect of this question regarding whether Christians and Muslims believe in and worship the same God: that there is no way to respond to this matter without taking into account the many ways in which true belief unfolds and true worship is practiced in each tradition. In the end, what we need is a “sufficient similarity” between what Christians and Muslims refer to as God or Allah, and the rest of the book provides a variety of arguments as to why this is exactly what we have.

It is in part III that we get to the heart of the theological matter. Is a positive response to Volf’s question defensible in light of the Christian affirmation of the Trinity and the Christian doctrines of divine mercy and unconditional love? In particular, Christians affirm that God is the Father of Jesus Christ—this is central to the Christian trinitarian claim. Volf’s response is at least threefold. First, what Muslims reject is not orthodox trinitarianism but caricatures, misunderstandings, and popular distortions of the doctrine, all of which Christians not only also have disallowed but should welcome from their Muslim co-religionists. Second, Volf attempts to avoid the scandal of attributing divinity to creaturely realities (which Muslim consider blasphemous) by reminding us that few orthodox Christian theologians claims in a straightforward sense that “Jesus was God” and that it is more appropriate to say instead, following the Apostle Paul, that “God was in Christ….” Last but not least, Allah prosecutes a rigorous and robust defense of the unity of God as central to Christian belief and doctrine. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Volf is dialectically subtle, theologically informed (by both biblical and Qur’anic traditions), and philosophically nuanced. Despite stellar efforts here, though, the scandal of Christian faith—the incarnation of God in Christ—probably cannot be avoided and not many Christians, nor Muslims, will think this specific theological and dogmatic hurdle has been overcome with this book. Still, whereas the preceding takes up only one chapter in this part of the volume, two other chapters are devoted to unpacking the claim that both Christians and Muslims believe in and live their lives according to the conviction that God or Allah is merciful, just, and unconditionally loving. Christians also go on to insist that such mercy and loving-kindness should extend to enemies (whereas Muslims have usually gone only so far as to assert the importance of being kind to all), which is all the more important in light of our contemporary “clash of civilizations” between “the West” and the “Islamic bloc.”

The final part of the book includes four chapters on the practical implications of Volf’s thesis. Here equally hard questions are confronted such as the possibility of joint or simultaneous Christian and Muslim identity or religious adherence (which Volf argues to be viable under certain conditions); the challenges of proselytization and collaboration amid Christian mission and Muslim dawah; the relationship between monotheistic faith and common government in a pluralistic world; and the Christian and Muslim quest for the common good in our time. The volume closes with an epilogue on a multipronged approach “combating extremism,” a task that is urged on both Christians and Muslims together, as well as with about 45 pages of helpful endnotes.

What is crucial about Allah: A Christian Response is Volf’s decision to bracket the question of eternal salvation from the discussion. At one level, this is understandable since in the end, eschatological salvation lies in the hands of God, not human beings. On the other hand, however, those Christians who have the most at stake in this argument are not the progressive or liberal ones for whom either the questions engaged by Volf are passé or his answers are non-controversial; instead, it is conservative and evangelical Christians who are most likely to be taken up with the thesis argued here. And in most cases—e.g., the book by the dean of Beeson Divinity School, Timothy George, Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? (Zondervan, 2002)—the answer is, “no, Christians do not worship the same God as Muslims.” One of the major reasons for this is the reluctance to unhinge the ultimate soteriological question from the overall theological discussion. The result is a further irony: that it is those who emphasize the other-worldly dimension of God’s saving work as finally most important are also the ones who seem to minimize the possibility of rapprochement between Christians and Muslims on this side of the eschaton.

Still, Volf has written a courageous, important, and timely book. He cannot be accused of accommodating Christian orthodoxy in accomplishing his task, so all future counter-arguments will need to pay careful attention to Allah: A Christian Response. And even if some conservative Christians might resist the possibility of a conjoined Christian-Muslim religious identity, there are by now enough examples of how, due to the exigencies of history, Muslim disciples of Jesus have emerged in Islamic contexts so that like it or not, these are part of the realities of the pluralistic world of the twenty-first century rather than aberrations. I would go further to suggest that the arguments unfolded in this book have implications not only for Christian-Muslim relations but also for the Christian understanding of and encounter, dialogue, and engagement with those in other faiths as well—in particular Judaism (which parallels Volf appeals to repeatedly in these pages), not to mention Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, and even indigenous religious traditions.

To return to the significance of Volf’s book for Pentecostalism, however, its urgency cannot be under-accentuated. Elsewhere—especially in my book Hospitality and the Other: Pentecost, Christian Practices, and the Neighbor (Orbis, 2008)—I have documented the expansion of Pentecostalism in the global South, in various regions across Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam is a majority religion. Pentecostal missionary and evangelistic zeal, often coupled with aggressiveness against those in other faiths, Islam as well, can combine with Muslim belligerence to produce a combustible socio-political mix. Some might be concerned that coming to agree with Volf (about their worshipping the same God as Muslims) might undermine the Pentecostal missionary impulse; this of course gets us to the heart of the soteriological matter—that Pentecostals might be unwilling to seriously entertain a theological proposal that they perceive as working against their practical commitments. But I would urge all Pentecostals to pause and consider whether their attitudes toward Islam and Muslims are driven by pragmatic motivations (i.e., a missionary impulse) or whether the latter should instead be the case: that good mission practices can and should emerge from out of solid theological foundations. In this latter case, perhaps a more viable, defensible, and productive common mission might indeed be forged with Muslim collaborators than in opposition to those for whom the God of Mohammed may not be radically different from the God of Jesus Christ. Miroslav Volf, a Pentecostal PK who grew up in the former “Yugoslavia” and endured wars and ethnic tensions between Christians and Muslims, would at least like us to consider this possibility, and has thus done us all in the Pentecostal community in particular and the Christian community at large a huge favor by writing this very accessible—yet for all that very deeply theological and yet intensely practical—book. There may not be a more important volume on the Christian encounter with Islam or on Christian theology in the pluralistic world of the twenty-first century currently on offer than this one.

Reviewed by Amos Yong

Notes
¹ This review was based on the pre-release copy.

Publisher’s page, read a sample: http://www.harpercollins.com/9780061927089/allah

Further Reading:
Mark Galli interviews Miroslav Volf asking, “Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?” www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/april/muslimschristianssamegod.html