On not listening to Muslims: Hearer Excess and Reformed Christian Theology

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.