11 - ABRAHAM AND THE “ABRAHAMIC FAITHS”

Summary

Interfaith dialogue is an important topic at the present time. On the one hand, secularized indifference, or hostility, toward religion can encourage members of the various religious traditions to look beyond historic controversies to see if they can find greater common ground on which to act together and resist apathy or onslaught. On the other hand, the increasing social and political profile of Islam in many Western countries, quite apart from the acute problems posed by militant Islamism, naturally leads to a desire on the part of Jews and Christians in those countries to ask afresh about the right understanding and appropriate mutual relations of their respective faiths. But whatever the reasons – and they are many and varied – interfaith dialogue, especially among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, has become an established feature of the theological landscape and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims bear certain “family likenesses,” which are not shared equally with, say, Hindus or Buddhists. In general terms, their respective histories are, in certain important ways, intertwined; and in both theological conceptualities and in approaches to life under God, there are recognizable similarities. Perhaps most famously, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all “monotheistic.”1 They are all, in one way or other, to use a classic Muslim category, “people of the book.” And recently it has become increasingly common to refer to them as “the Abrahamic faiths/religions,” since within each tradition Abraham stands near the beginning of a history of right response to God.