This panel is a collection of four exercises in comparative theology that engage the Islamic and Hindu traditions from both Muslim and Christian perspectives. The discipline of comparative theology has typically remained a Christian project. However, recently comparative theology has been employed by non-Christian scholar-practitioners and theologians and this panel, in part, seeks to continue this trend. Additionally, most exercises in Christian comparative theology have predominantly engaged Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions, but this panel, in part, seeks to explore Christian engagement with Islamic traditions.
The Islamic tradition has a long history of engagement with the Hindu tradition. However, there are not many sources from the past that contain detailed examinations of Vaiṣṇava theology. This paper explores an important area of comparative theological inquiry in regards to Vaiṣṇava-Muslim dialogue, namely the centrality of the prakṛti-puruṣa divide in Vaiṣṇava theology and its lack of equivalent in Islamic theology. The argument will explore to what extent the cosmological doctrines articulated in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa may be incommensurable with Islamic theology. Vaiṣṇava theological arguments for the ontological equivalence of the spiritual world (Vaikuṇṭha) with puruṣa will be contrasted to Islamic eschatological doctrines regarding the ultimately created nature of experience in the Hereafter (al-Ākhira). Possible avenues for reconciliation will be explored, but the focus will be on proper representation of Vaiṣṇava views in conversation with the author's own theological commitments as a Muslim.
Islam’s relationship with other great faiths is perhaps among the most important issues of “modernity” that Muslims in Europe and North America have had to negotiate. Through an exploration of Martin Nguyen’s Muslim theology of prostration, Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī’s expansion of the dār paradigm, and Fayṣal al-Mawlawī’s emphasis on shahāda (witnessing), I posit the notion of dār al-shahāda (the abode of witnessing). The presentation concludes with a comparative theological meditation between dār al-shahāda and Christian missiology with implications for Muslim-Christian engagement.
In exploring the potentials of comparative theology as contextual theology, this paper adapts a form of Fr. David Burrell’s method of triangulation, which usually introduces a third individual theological voice from the Abrahamic traditions as a means to illuminate and break impasses that can occur in a two-way dialogue (Burrell 2011). Instead of a third theological tradition, *a contemporary case study of a practice-based theological source, plays the functional role of the third source*, breaking stagnation and creating opportunities for new exchange. Through this case study, the particular–the practical theological insights of contemporary Christian and Muslim peacebuilders–becomes a partner in comparison. The particular provides purpose and recalibration within the comparative theological exercise, and pushes this study on the future oriented virtue of hope and its complementary opposite, fear, to arrive at practical, applicable conclusions on how to cultivate hope oriented to God that persists in the midst of earthly uncertainty.
Both Christian and Islamic theology affirm Christ as prophet. Yet as Kristin Johnston Largen has observed, within Christian discourse Jesus’ prophethood “has been marginalized for centuries in favor of his identity as savior.” In the realm of Christian theology, this lacuna may lead to a christology which is insufficiently prophetic – in other words, an understanding of Jesus Christ which de-emphasizes the apocalyptic role of a prophet in speaking out against injustice. Creatively engaging the concept of embodied prophethood via Michael Muhammad Knight’s work on the prophetic body; Graybill’s description of the queer prophetic body in the Hebrew Bible; and influential descriptions of Jesus’ prophetic role by Calvin and Barth, this exploration of prophetic christology will attempt to find common ground between Christian and Islamic approaches to Jesus’ prophethood in the interest of a shared commitment to justice and social transformation.