Samuel Zwemer, the 19th-century Christian missionary and scholar, noted the resonance between Islamic thought and Reformed Protestant Christianity. “Islam indeed…is the Calvinism of the Orient. It, too, was a call to acknowledge the sovereignty of God’s will…It, too, saw in nature and sought in Revelation the majesty of God’s presence and power, the manifestation of his glory transcendent and omnipotent…Calvinism and Islam had much in common.” These similarities are also marked by deep disagreements on fundamental issues such as Jesus of Nazareth, the prophethood of Muhammad, and the nature of salvation. Even with these vital differences, the theological similarities between Sunni Islam and the Reformed or Calvinist tradition remain. Given this conceptual overlap, Reformed theologians appear well positioned to engage in comparative dialogue with the Islamic theological tradition.
However, the more systematic strands of the Reformed theology have largely failed to engage with Islam substantially on its own terms. Barth argues that the apparent similarities between Calvinism and Sunni Islam around God’s power and providence are a chimera since the God of Islam and the God of Christianity are not the same. Jürgen Moltmann often claims that Islamic political theology lends itself to totalitarianism because of Muslims’ strong commitments to God’s unity. Even Schleiermacher dismisses Islam as inherently sensual and fatalistic in the Glaubenslehre.
The failure to take Muslim thought seriously within Reformed theology is a missed opportunity for deepening Christian-Muslim theological exchange and for advancing internal Reformed dogmatic arguments about the nature of divine speech and revelation, theologies of religion, etc. This paper argues that to develop a comparative theology in a Reformed idiom, Christian theology must address our epistemic arrogance toward Islam and Muslims. This is the first step toward a dialogue that would take seriously the challenges that Islamic thought presents to Christian systematic theology. While it is often assumed that this arrogance is exclusively found in Reformed theologians who are prone toward more definitive theological claims, the paper also considers how more liberal expressions of Reformed Christianity are prone to marginalize the theological claims and challenges of Islamic thought.
To advance this methodological argument, the paper draws on Jennifer Lackey’s Testimonial Injustice, a work on law courts and the epistemology of testimony. This work has added significant nuance to thinking about knowledge production, testimony, and epistemic biases. While Lackey is not particularly concerned with questions of religious or inter-religious communities, she offers important distinctions that can enrich the comparative theological method.
In addition to common understandings of epistemological injustice as grounded in bias, Lackey proposes a model of epistemic injustice she terms hearer excess. This is the epistemic privileging that one gives to oneself or one’s community. It does not necessarily depend on putting the other down, but on puffing oneself up. By giving excess credibility to one’s own tradition, you are prone to either unintentionally dismiss or ignore the other. This need not simply be through polemics, but in a more casual elevation of one’s own tradition. For instance, this is evident in how Maliki jurists prefer to follow their own school, or in the practice of scholars of Karl Barth to strain a gnat in the deluge of his writings in order to defend his position on women.
Shifted into the realm of comparative theology, this helps account for why Reformed theologians have historically ignored or dismissed Muslim claims about God, the Qur’an, Christology, the human condition, and revelation as unreliable. Such a position may often arise out of epistemic injustices based on anti-speaker bias. However post Vatican II and given the recent rise in inter-religious dialogue, there is an increasing tendency within liberal Protestantism toward what Lackey calls hearer excess. That is a penchant to think that the Christian (or liberal) tradition already contains within itself all that is necessary to know or say about God, the world, humanity, and salvation. Or that the Christian logics are more coherent than they are. With such a hearer excess bias, what can I learn theologically from a non-Christian religion in general, let alone one that has often understood itself to be in continuity and critique of Christianity? Why should I engage concretely with Islamic critiques of Christology or the law, when liberal Protestant Christianity already knows that all religions express the same core principles?
To counter this hearer excess, the paper proposes that Christian theologians should expand their understanding of credible theological witnesses to include Muslims. To justify this theology of testimony, the paper draws from the Muslim philosopher Muhammad Aziz Lahbabi’s understanding of bearing witness as an act of making yourself accountable to yourself, to history, and to your neighbours. According to Lahbabi, to bear witness is not simply to confess one’s allegiance to God, but also to enter into contestation with other Muslims and critics of Islam. I argue that Lahbabi's model finds some resonance with certain strains of Reformed theology of confessions. Confessions of faith are not timeless truths, but non-binding and provisional human testimonies to God. They are engaged as sources of knowledge, but also as fragile testimonies worthy of engagement.
This does not necessitate agreement with Islamic thought or inclusion of Islamic creeds in books of confessions, but it does demand an epistemic shift that values Muslim questions, ideas, and theologies, much in the same way that Christian theology already includes non-Christian philosophers as serious sources for theological knowledge. To do this, one must hold in abeyance the questions of religious superiority, and take seriously the words and testimony of Muslims, to a God who has spoken in the Qur’an, called humans to right worship. What is needed is not so much an a priori theological interpretation of Islam or an account of revelation after Jesus Christ but a willingness to enter into deep nuanced discussion based on genuine learning and debate. That is to say, what is needed is not a theology of Islam in the form of a theology of religions but a comparative theology written in dialogue with Islamic thought that attends to our own hearer excess.
Samuel Zwemer famously compared Calvinism to Islam, noting how Sunni Islam and Reformed Christianity shared commitments to divine sovereignty, revelation, and a critique of idolatry. Despite these broad conceptual similarities, Western Reformed systematic theologians such as Schleiermacher, Barth, and Moltmann rarely engage in depth with Islamic thought. Instead, they use Muslims and Islam as brief examples to reinforce Christian theological superiority. This paper draws from Jennifer Lackey’s philosophical study of testimony and courts to argue that Reformed Christian views on Islam are shaped in part by a form of epistemic superiority that she calls hearer excess. To counter this hearer excess, I propose a model of comparative theology carried out as witness and counter-witness - an approach for deepening Christian-Muslim theological exchange and for advancing internal Reformed dogmatic arguments about the nature of divine speech and revelation, theologies of religion, the doctrine of God, and other theological loci.