Here’s my summary of Miroslav Volf’s Introduction:

The stakes are high: we’re talking here about more than half of humanity – not to mention crucial issues such as population growth, diminishing natural resources (water etc.).

Volf grew up in Yugoslavia – a part of the world where past conflicts between Christians and Muslims are still alive in people’s memories (Blackbird’s Field 1389, the fall of Constantinople 1453, the Siege of Vienna 1529 etc.).   Are such wars mainly to do with religion?   Sometimes (eg. Arabs vs. Christians warring over Jerusalem’s holy sites).   Sometimes not – eg. the conflicts in Nigeria between the predominantly Muslim north and the Christian south have both ethnic and economic – oil – components.

Sometimes the tensions relate to Christians’ desire to evangelize, and Muslims’ resistance to such proselytization (da’wa).   Christians generally find Islamic apostasy laws reprehensible: but Muslims are deeply offended by Christians like former U.S. presidential hopeful Pat Robertson referring to Allah as the ‘moon god of Mecca’.   (He thereby infers that the two religions have radically different gods).   The stronger the tensions, the more likely the respective gods will appear to be incompatible. ‘The claim that Muslims and Christians worship radically different deities is good for fighting, but not for living together peacefully.’   It is best, says Volf, to view the God of the Bible and the Qu’ran embodying overlapping ultimate values: they have a ‘common God’.

In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address after four years of brutal civil war he noted that members of both the Union and Confederate forces read the same Bible and prayed to the same God – but the prayers of both could not be answered.   ‘Can it be said of Muslims and Christians, today caught in deep conflicts, that they worship the same God? Yes it can. That is exactly what I argue in this book.’   Volf notes that progressives and conservatives have different perspectives here, and ‘I am, roughly, an “equal opportunity” offender when it comes to both of these camps.’

He then asserts that

* he’s a committed Christian, embracing the classical expressions of the Christian faith;

* he’s writing as and for Christians (not Muslims), but he’s writing in the presence of Muslims and would appreciate their response;

* there are many varieties of Muslims and Christians – but he’ll try to write from the perspective of ‘normative mainstream’ Christianity and Islam;

* his ‘paradigmatic Muslim’ is Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1056-1111) not, for example, Sayyid Qutb (1906-66);

* the aim is to be both ‘truthful and charitable’

* he mostly doesn’t engage Judaism;

* the supreme aim is to ask how we can all live well in a single world where two religious communities have two rival versions of the Master of the Universe (so he describes himself as a ‘political theologian’).

Summary of his theses:

1. Christians and Muslims worship one and the same God, the only God
2. Muslim monotheism is not incompatible with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity
3. In both religions, God is loving and just, and
4. Commands that we love our neighbours, and
5. They both have a similar moral framework (there’s no inevitable ‘clash of civilizations’).
6. So Christians and Muslims can be allies in their quest for the ‘good life’ (justice and love, rather than pleasure).
7. What matters most is whether you love God with all your heart and whether you trust and obey Jesus Christ the Word of God and the Lamb of God
8. Love and justice are rooted in the character of God
9. All have a right to witness about their faith – but all have an obligation to follow the golden rule. ‘I reject both all suppression of freedom of expression and all uncharitable ways of exercising that freedom’.
10. So we all embrace pluralism, with the state as impartial.   ‘I reject the idea that monotheism, properly understood, fosters violence and totalitarian rule’.

Re the central ‘ideological’ question in relations between these two faiths – the identity and character of God:   ‘I try to expose encrusted positions and emotionally-charged negative stereotypes and instead, to speak truth in love. At the level of discourse, this is how wars are prevented and the road to peace is paved.’

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