Why Atonement? Who Needs It? Atonement in Muslim-Christian Theological Engagement

The place of the study of Islam within the “field” of Christian comparative theology is unique in various ways. Islam, like Rabbinic Judaism, offers a reading of the biblical and post-biblical tradition distinctly different from that proposed by the Christian tradition. Though it is of doubtful value to lump all three together under the rubric “Abrahamic,” there is no escaping the fact that we inhabit the same world of discourse, and therefore Christian theology ignores these challenging voices to its own detriment. Those of us in the “field” know how enriching for our theologizing is the careful attention we pay to the voice of the other, and this is particularly the case with Muslim voices, because Islam emerges from the Late-Antique religious matrix in which the key elements of Christian faith were still matters of active and often contentious debate. Indeed, the Qur’ān and the early Islamic tradition bear witness to the fact that, in the seventh century, Christians had still not yet found a convincing, or even comprehensible, way to proclaim their faith in the God of Jesus Christ to the many who were prepared to believe in the God of Abraham and to recognize in the history of the People of Israel—including in the mission of Jesus—a privileged locus of God’s engagement with humanity.

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