NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Vivekananda, “The Ideal of Universal Religion,” The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 1971), 2:375–76.

2. The number is shrinking, but still represents a substantial percentage of Americans. See Gregory A. Smith, “A Growing Share of Americans Say It’s Not Necessary to Believe in God to Be Moral,” Pew Research Center, October 16, 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/16/a-growing-share-of-americans-say-its-not-necessary-to-believe-in-god-to-be-moral.

3. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195385045.001.0001.

4. See Reza Aslan, “Sam Harris and ‘New Atheists’ Aren’t New, Aren’t Even Atheists,” Salon, November 21, 2014, https://www.salon.com/2014/11/21/reza_aslan_sam_harris_and_new_atheists_arent_new_arent_even_atheists.

5. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, ed. Todd Dufresne, trans. Gregory Richter (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2012), 103.

6. Keith Ward, Is Religion Dangerous? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 42–55. His work is primarily a defense of religion.

7. Martin E. Marty, foreword to The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. J. Harold Ellens (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 1:xi.

8. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, ed., Interfaith Just Peacemaking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3.

9. See Carol Bakhos, The Family of Abraham: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Interpretations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Aaron W. Hughes, Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199934645.001.0001.

10. Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 39.

11. Critique emerged in the context of jurisprudence to repair ruptures in the ideal operation of the polis. See Wendy Brown, introduction to Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, ed. Talal Asad et al. (Berkeley: University of California Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009), 9, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/84q9c6ft.

12. Babylonian Talmud Yoma 69b. Compelling analyses can be found in Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmud Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 61–76; Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “Refuting the Yetzer: The Evil Inclination and the Limits of Rabbinic Discourse,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 17:2 (2009): 117–41, doi:10.1163/105369909X12506863090396.

13. See Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “‘What Scripture Tells Me’: Spontaneity and Regulation within the Catholic Charismatic Renewal,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 27. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), helpfully unsettles the fixity of “secular.”

CHAPTER 1: WHAT ARE DANGEROUS RELIGIOUS IDEAS?

1. For “cultures of violence,” see Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Oakland: University of California Press, 2003), 10–15. Cavanaugh contests the focus on religion as a unique impetus for violence, The Myth of Religious Violence.

2. See Meerten B. ter Borg and Jan Willem van Henten, Powers: Religion as a Social and Spiritual Force (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), doi:10.5422/fso/9780823231560.001.0001.

3. See Lloyd Steffen, The Demonic Turn: The Power of Religion to Inspire or Restrain Violence (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003); Hector Avalos, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005); Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002).

4. Rutilius, A Voyage Home to Gaul, c. 413. The citation can be found in Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 87–88; Seneca, “Belief and Prayer,” as cited in Augustine, The City of God 6:11, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1993), 203.

5. See Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995); Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987).

6. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 8.

7. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and “The Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999).

8. See Daniel Pals, Eight Theories of Religion (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 294. He argued that no theoretical approach can today claim dominance, leading many scholars in the field to adopt a similarly ad hoc methodology.

9. Alfred Adler, The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (London: Routledge, 1999). Gilles Deleuze nuances Nietzsche’s power analysis in Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

10. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 66. Scholars of psychology positively disposed toward religion include Carl Jung, Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, Michael McCullough, Kenneth Pargament, and Carl Thoresen.

11. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 421.

12. Georges Khodr, “Violence and the Gospel,” CrossCurrents 37:4 (1987–88), 405.

13. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

14. Walter Wink, “The Myth of Redemptive Violence,” in The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. J. Harold Ellens (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 3:278, 269.

15. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010); Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God.

16. Robert Bellah described key aspects of human development “as the acquisition of a series of capacities, all of which have contributed to the formation of religion.” Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 44.

17. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 34, 50, 120–122.

18. Luther H. Martin, “Religion and Cognition,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. John Hinnells (London: Routledge, 2005), 476. David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) challenges this consensus.

19. See Boyer, Religion Explained, 137–67; Ralph D. Mecklenburger, Our Religious Brains: What Cognitive Science Reveals about Belief (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2012), 1–36.

20. See Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 14.

21. “Universal” does not mean that everyone everywhere embraces the value; rather it does not appear to be culturally bound. See Marc Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (New York: Ecco, 2006).

22. Wilson argued that nonrational features of religion should “be studied respectfully as potential adaptations in their own right rather than as idiot relatives of rational thought” in Darwin’s Cathedral, 122–23.

23. See Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 1–10.

24. See Andrew Newberg, Principles of Neurotheology (London: Routledge, 2010), 84, 91.

25. Malcolm A. Jeeves and Warren S. Brown, Neuroscience, Psychology and Religion: Illusions, Delusions, and Realities about Human Nature (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2009), 134–35. See Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, xii–xiv.

26. Meister Eckhart, Mystische Schriften, as cited in Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), 305, n. 3.

27. Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away, 37.

28. Ignacio Castuera, “A Social History of Christian Thought on Abortion: Ambiguity vs. Certainty in Moral Debate,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 76:1 (2017): 121–227, doi:10.1111/ajes.12174.

29. It can be operative in Shi’a cultures as well, but with somewhat different requirements.

30. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 17.

31. Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

32. Charles Selengut, Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 193.

33. Avalos, Fighting Words, 68.

34. Vivekananda, “The Ideal of Universal Religion,” 396.

CHAPTER 2: SCRIPTURE AS A DANGEROUS RELIGIOUS IDEA

1. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), x, 14–15.

2. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1:3.

3. See James Watts, “The Three Dimensions of Scripture,” Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds 2:2–3 (2006): 135–69; Benjamin Sommer, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 11–26.

4. See R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 45–72, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511612619.

5. Scriptures are multivocal, and some interpretations are debatable. Nonetheless, problematic verses on the identified concerns include the following:

a.  Slavery: Exod. 21:1–27, Lev. 25:39–55, Deut. 15:12–18, Eph. 6:5–9, 1 Tim. 6:1–3, Philemon, Qur’an 4:24, 24:32–33, 30:28

b.  Homosexuality: Lev. 18:22, 20:13, Rom. 1:26–27, 1 Cor. 6:9–10, Qur’an 7:80–81, 26:165–66

c.  Punishment: Gen. 6, 18:16–19:28, Lev. 24:15–22, Matt. 25:41–46, 10:11–15, Acts 5:1–10, Heb. 10:26–30, Qur’an 5:33–40; 14:48–51; 32:20–22

d.  Women: Gen. 3:16, Exod. 21:7, Num. 5, 1 Cor. 14:33–35, Eph. 5:22–24, 1 Tim. 2:11–15, Qur’an 4:11, 34; 24:31

e.  Religious others: Num. 31:9–18, Deut. 7:1–6, 18:9–14, Matt. 23, John 8:31–47, Acts 7:51–53, 1 Cor. 6:9–10, Qur’an 5:72–86, 9:1–17, 81:1–14

6. Reuven Firestone, “Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism: History and Possibility,” Arches Quarterly 4:7 (2010): 10.

7. Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, and A Political Treatise (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 182.

8. Gregory of Nyssa condemned slavery in the fourth century (“Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes”). See Trevor Dennis, “Man Beyond Price: Gregory of Nyssa and Slavery,” in Heaven and Earth: Essex Essays in Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Peter J. Wexler (Worthing, UK: Churchman, 1986), 129.

9. Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiii. Sura 90 and other passages exhort individuals to free slaves as an act of piety.

10. Albert Bledsoe, An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1856), 223. See Granville Sharp, The Just Limitation of Slavery (London: B. White, E. & C. Dilly, 1776); Willard Swartley, Slavery, Sabbath, War and Women (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1983); Hector Avalos, Slavery, Abolitionism and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011).

11. Ingrid Mattson, The Story of the Qur’an: Its History and Place in Muslim Life (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 184.

12. Paul Achtemeier, Inspiration and Authority: Nature and Function of Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1998), 145.

13. Cited in Nasr, The Study Quran, 515. See chap. 10 for further discussion of taḥrif (corruption).

14. The meaning of evangelical claims regarding inerrancy is contested. Compare, for example, the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” 1978, http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html, to that of Fuller Theological Seminary (“What We Believe and Teach,” 2019, http://fuller.edu/About/Mission-and-Values/What-We-Believe-and-Teach).

15. Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 31.

16. See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 83–95 (reflecting on Hebrew Bible’s “Binding of Isaac” in Gen. 21).

17. Khaled Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (London: Oneworld, 2001), 93. See also Stephen Fowl, “Texts Don’t Have Ideologies,” Biblical Interpretation 3:1 (1995): 15–34, doi:10.1163/156851595X00023.

18. See, e.g., Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983); Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002); Wadud, Qur’an and Woman.

19. Philo, Allegorical Commentary, “The Worse Attacks the Better” (Quod deterius potiori insidiari soleat), 125; quoted in Maren Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 173. See also Christian Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 1–3.

20. See, e.g., Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed 3:31; Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan; Ibn Rushd, The Incoherence of the Incoherence; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I–II.90.1.

21. A locus classicus for this claim is found in b. Hagiga 3a-b. See Shmuel Safrai, “Oral Tora,” in The Literature of the Sages, vol. 3 of The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 35–88, doi:10.1163/9789004275133_003.

22. See Francis Sullivan, Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002).

23. Augustine, “Against the Epistle of Manichaeus Called Fundamental” 4:5, trans. Richard Stothert, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff (London: T&T Clark, 1887), 4:135.

24. See Jonathan Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (London: Oneworld, 2009). There are modern scripturalist movements in Islam (e.g., Wahhabism), but they generally ascribe authority to the sunna.

25. Code of Canon Law 4, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P3V.HTM. See also James A. Coriden, An Introduction to Canon Law (New York: Paulist Press, 2004), 147–48.

26. Narrated by al-Tirmidhi, 3895; Ibn Maajah, 1977; classified as saheeh (sound, authoritative) by al-Albaani in Saheeh al-Tirmidhi. See also Nasr, ed., The Study Quran (New York: HarperOne, 2015), 206–8.

27. Walter Wink, The Bible in Human Transformation: Towards a New Paradigm for Biblical Study (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1973).

28. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 337. James L. Kugel discusses the goals of early historical criticism in How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007), 686.

29. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Unmasking Ideologies in Biblical Interpretation,” in History of Biblical Interpretation: A Reader, ed. William Yarchin (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), 391–92.

30. S. Parvez Manzoor, “Method against Truth: Orientalism and Qur’anic Studies,” Muslim World Book Review 7 (1987): 33. Hava Lazarus-Yafeh theorized that text-critical tools developed within medieval Islam led to modern historical-critical study of scripture; see Intertwined Worlds: Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 130.

31. See Rahel Fishbach, “Politics of Scripture: Discussions of the Historical-Critical Approach to Qur’an” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2017).

CHAPTER 3: JUDAISM—THE CANONIZATION OF CONTROVERSY

1. For theories about the rise of the interpreter in the Second Temple period, see James Kugel, Traditions of the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2–11.

2. See William Yarchin, ed., introduction to History of Biblical Interpretation: A Reader (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), xvi; David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 31.

3. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 40.

4. Catholic exegesis similarly formalized four senses (Quadriga), as captured by this medieval Latin ditty: Littera gesta docet, Quid credas allegoria, Moralis quid agas, Quo tendas anagogia. (“The literal sense teaches the facts, the allegorical what you should believe, the moral what you should do, the anagogical where you are headed.”)

5. The interpretation is based in part on Ps. 62:12: “One thing God has spoken; two things have I heard.” A medieval text (Numbers Rabbah 13.15) speaks about the seventy faces or facets of Torah.

6. See Steven Fraade, “Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited: Between Praxis and Thematization,” AJS Review 31:1 (2007): 1–40, doi:10.1017/S0364009407000219.

7. Stern, Midrash and Theory, 23, 33; see also Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, and Noam J. Zohar, eds., The Jewish Political Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 1:307–20.

8. Decisions could be overturned by sages with superior numbers or wisdom. One sage argued that recording minority opinions precludes someone from later presenting them as alternative traditions of equal weight. Cf. t. Ed. 1:4.

9. Hillel and Shammai were prominent sages at the turn of the Common Era, often portrayed in disagreement. The tradition attributed to each a “school,” a disciple circle that transmitted and expanded upon their teachings.

10. Tannaitic texts give the impression that rabbinic Judaism was normative for the community, but it was several centuries before it became the predominant form of Judaism that survived destruction of the Temple and exile.

11. See Fraade, “Rabbinic Polysemy.” Like him, I sidestep to what degree the texts are literary constructions versus representations of actual rabbinic culture.

12. Scholars have invested tremendous energy exploring textual evidence, timing, context, and influences in the thematization of multivocality. I affirm Fraade’s conclusion it was “progressive rather than sudden and dialectical rather than linear” (“Rabbinic Polysemy,” 39). See also Azzan Yadin, Scripture as Logos (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 70–76; Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Richard Hidary, “Classical Rhetorical Arrangement and Reasoning in the Talmud,” AJS Review 34:1 (2010): 33–64, doi:10.1017/S0364009410000279; Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

13. It is an expansion of m. Avot 2:8.

14. Rubenstein, “The Thematization of Dialectics in Bavli Aggada,” Journal of Jewish Studies 54:1 (2003): 72, doi:10.18647/2457/JJS-2003.

15. Saadia’s minimization of disagreement also served to defend rabbinic discourse against Karaite critique.

16. See Hanina Ben-Menahem, “Controversy and Dialogue in the Jewish Tradition: An Interpretive Essay,” in Controversy and Dialogue in the Jewish Tradition: A Reader, ed. Ben-Menahem, Neil S. Hecht, and Shai Wosner (London: Routledge, 2005), 24–25; David Weiss Halivni, Midrash, Mishnah and Gemara: The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 108–11. Other motives include encouraging high-caliber intellectual leadership by honing critical thought and diminishing gaps between contradictory arguments by exploring them all.

17. The phrase is interpreted this way only once in Talmud, but is invoked frequently after the expulsion from Spain in 1492 brought diverse Jewish communities together. See Ben-Menahem, “Controversy and Dialogue,” 19–29.

18. A portrait emerges through scattered texts. In m. Rosh Hash. 2:8–9, they disagree about the calendar, and Rabban Gamaliel commands Rabbi Joshua to appear before him dressed for business on a day that the latter considered a holy day. After Joshua yields, they reconcile and Gamaliel admits he is lesser in knowledge (but not authority).

19. Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 46.

20. Peirushei Ha’agadot L’Rabbi Azriel on b. Hag. 3b; see Ben-Menahem et al., Controversy and Dialogue, 165–66. R. Moshe Chaim Luzzatto’s work on ethics, Derekh Eitz Chaim (eighteenth century), imagined that every soul among the 600,000 who stood at Sinai received a part of Torah, and sparks that radiate from Torah study illumine in 600,000 ways. Gershom Scholem recounted Reb Mendel of Rymanov’s interpretation that all the Israelites collectively heard on Sinai was the first letter of the first word of the Ten Commandments—aleph, a silent letter: “To hear the aleph is to hear next to nothing; it is the preparation for all audible language, but in itself conveys no determinate, specific meaning” (On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim [New York: Schocken Books, 1965], 29–30).

21. See Halbertal, People of the Book, 63–72.

22. Cited in Ben-Menahem et al., Controversy and Dialogue, 161.

23. A parallel in y. Mo’ed Qatan 3:1 (81c-d) does not have God’s response. The complex narrative has been treated in numerous places; see Boyarin, Border Lines, 152–201; Jeffrey Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 34–63.

24. See Halbertal, People of the Book, 54–63. Karaite critique challenged Oral Torah in part because it canonized controversy; see David Kraemer, The Mind of the Talmud: An Intellectual History of the Bavli (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990), 106.

25. See Stephen D. Benin, “The Search for Truth in Sacred Scripture: Jews, Christians, and the Authority to Interpret,” in With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfish, and Joseph W. Goering (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 16–17, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195137279.003.0002.

26. Kraemer, Mind of the Talmud, 146. See b. Pesah. 21b and b. Hul. 114b, which compare the roles of reason and revelation.

27. See Saul Berman, “Lifnim Mishurat Hadin,” Journal of Jewish Studies 26:1–2 (1975): 86–104, doi: 10.18647/740/JJS-1975; 28:2 (1977): 181–93, doi: 10.18647/827/JJS-1977. For discussion of God’s occasional disregard of truth, see Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?, 171–245.

28. Christine Hayes, “Legal Truth, Right Answers and Best Answers: Dworkin and the Rabbis,” Diné Israel 25 (2008): 86. Cf. Richard Hidary, “Right Answers Revisited: Monism and Pluralism in the Talmud,” Diné Israel 26–27 (2009–10): 229–55.

29. William Kolbrener, “‘Chiseled from All Sides’: Hermeneutics and Dispute in Rabbinic Tradition,” AJS Review 28:2 (2004): 277.

30. See Shlomo Pines, “The Limitations of Human Knowledge According to Al-Farabi, ibn Bajja, and Maimonides,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 1:82–109.

31. Cited in Halbertal, People of the Book, 79.

32. Deut. Rab. 3:13 speculates that Ezra wrote dots above problematic passages (preserved in Masoretic tradition).

33. Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 88.

34. See Ben-Menahem et al., Controversy and Dialogue, 126–29.

35. Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 143–69.

36. Ahad Ha’am, “Perurim” (Crumbs), 1892, as cited in Yaacov Shavit and Mordechai Eran, The Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books, trans. Chaya Naor (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 521–22.

37. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 10–17. See also Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983), 18–22.

38. R. Eliyahu haCohen, Shevet Musar 22, as cited in Yehudah Levi’s discussion of ḥidush in Torah Study: A Survey of Classic Sources on Timely Issues (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1990), 202.

CHAPTER 4: CHRISTIANITY—THE HUMAN EQUATION

1. Harry Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 76.

2. On tolerance in the early church, see Henry Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4. Irenaeus (130–202) allowed diversity in practice, seeing an underlying unanimity in faith. Firmilian (third century), bishop of Cappadocian Caesarea, declined to impose a single liturgical form (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.13). The fifth-century church historian Socrates affirmed Novatianist communities in Phrygia who granted autonomy to individual churches and embraced plural practices (Church History 5.20–21).

3. Robert W. Wall, “Ecumenicity and Ecclesiology: The Promise of the Multiple Letter Canon of the New Testament,” in The New Testament as Canon: A Reader in Canonical Criticism, ed. Wall and Eugene E. Lemcio (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic, 1992), 184–85. See also Rowan A. Greer, “The Christian Bible and its Interpretation,” in Early Biblical Interpretation, ed. Wayne A. Meeks (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 155–63.

4. John Reumann, Variety and Unity in New Testament Thought (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4–10.

5. The obvious differences, especially between John and Synoptic Gospels, inspired the Diatessaron (literally “through the four”), a synthesis of the four narratives that was popular in Syriac Christianity, until Theodoret destroyed all the known copies in 423.

6. See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Press, 1989).

7. Harry Gamble theorized that Marcionism, Gnosticism, Montanism, and other strains of Christian belief eventually declared heretical likely influenced the creation of the canon in the first place (New Testament Canon, 57, 88).

8. Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Gamble, New Testament Canon.

9. Freeman, A New History, 249, 253. An epistula (381 CE) declared that only men who affirmed the Nicene Creed could be bishops, classifying others as demented heretics and requiring them to forfeit churches and give up tax exemptions. Open protest met with expulsion; obedience was rewarded with privilege and patronage.

10. See Ross Shepard Kraemer and Mary Rose D’Angelo, Women and Christian Origins (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999).

11. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 335–36. For a comprehensive anthology of Jewish and Christian interpretations of Genesis 1:28, see Jeremy Cohen, “Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It”: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).

12. See Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1952); Yarchin, History of Biblical Interpretation; Magne Sæbø, ed., Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, 3 vols. (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000–2015).

13. Thomas Oden, series introduction to Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 1:xix.

14. See Donald K. McKim, ed., Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 964–65; Karlfried Froehlich, Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 14–15.

15. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.32.7–8; Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum 29. See also Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979).

16. Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012), viii, 151. See also Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007), 264.

17. Gordon Fee, “Hermeneutics and the Gender Debate,” in Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy, ed. Ronald Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothius (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 370.

18. Ellen F. Davis, “The Soil That Is Scripture,” in Engaging Biblical Authority: Perspectives on the Bible as Scripture, ed. William P. Brown (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 36–37.

19. Lieven Boeve, “The Particularity of Religious Truth Claims: How to Deal with It in a So-Called Postmodern Context,” in Truth: Interdisciplinary Dialogues in a Pluralist Age, ed. Christine Helmer and Kristin De Troyer (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 183.

20. See Anselm of Canterbury, De veritate 2 and his preface; also Aquinas, De veritate Q1.A1–3; Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, “To Tell the Truth,” in Truth, ed. Helmer and De Troyer, 219–23.

21. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 174.

22. Yarchin, History of Biblical Interpretation, 196–97.

23. Boeve, “The Particularity of Religious Truth Claims,” 185–86.

24. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,” trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1:203.

25. Alister McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, 4th ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 93.

26. Cited in Kugel, How to Read the Bible, 26–27.

27. Bruce Vawter, “The Bible in the Roman Catholic Church,” in Scripture in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Frederick Greenspahn (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982), 122.

28. Yarchin, History of Biblical Interpretation, xii.

29. Acts 17:23 speaks of the “unknown God,” perhaps the earliest Christian apophatic statement.

30. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology. For examples of medieval mysticism, see Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), The Cloud of Unknowing and St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul.

31. Peter Casarella, Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006).

32. James L. Heft, “Learned Ignorance,” in Learned Ignorance: Intellectual Humility among Jews, Christians and Muslims, ed. James L. Heft, Reuven Firestone, and Omid Safi (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4, doi:10.1093/acprof:osobl /9780199769308.003.0001.

33. Abelard, Sic et Non [Yes and No], introduction. The book collected conflicting teachings from scripture and the early Church Fathers on 158 controversial religious issues and let the contradictions stand.

34. Jerome spoke three times of scriptoris errorem (Ep. 77:5; Ep. 57:7; In Mich. 5:2), see Stephen R. Holmes, “Evangelical Doctrines of Scripture in Transatlantic Perspective,” Evangelical Quarterly 81:1 (2009), 41:16. For a review of Origen and his doubts about the historicity of select details, see Richard Hanson, Allegory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance of Origin’s Interpretation of Scripture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 259–88.

35. James Madison, The Federalist Papers 37.

36. See Origen, On First Principles. Irenaeus affirmed that the “apostles are found granting certain precepts in consideration of human infirmity” but—perhaps concerned about gnostic critique—simultaneously insisted that Christianity embodies eternal truth, without accommodation. See Benin, Footprints of God, 6–9.

37. Bertrande de Margerie, “Saint John Chrysostom, Doctor of Biblical ‘Condescension,’” in An Introduction to the History of Exegesis, trans. Leonard Maluf (Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1993), 1:189–212.

38. Benin, Footprints of God, 112. See, e.g., Augustine, The City of God 10.14.

39. Benin, Footprints of God, 181.

40. Vawter, “The Bible in the Roman Catholic Church,” 125. See also Nicholas Lash, Change in Focus: A Study of Doctrinal Change and Continuity (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973).

41. Daniel Madigan, “Saving Dominus Iesus,” in Learned Ignorance, ed. Heft, Firestone, and Safi, 266.

CHAPTER 5: ISLAM—THE ROLE OF DOUBT IN FAITH

1. Abu Amaar Yasir Qadhi, An Introduction to the Sciences of the Qur’an (Birmingham, UK: Al-Hidaayah Publishing, 1999), 172–83; Muhammad Mustafa Al-Azami, The History of the Qur’anic Text: From Revelation to Compilation (Leicester: UK Islamic Academy, 2002), 153. Most academics view harf as a textual variant since there are differences in wording, while Muslim tradition considers it a dialect because “variant” suggests uncertainty in transmission.

2. See 3:7, 43:4, 85:21–22; also Kecia Ali and Oliver Leaman, Islam: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2007), 102–3. Another interpretation portrays the Preserved Tablet as a repository with Allah’s plan for all creation.

3. Alternatively, one can read an emphasis on “your” religion, indicating its particular design for Muhammad’s community. See Fethullah Gulen, “Lawhun Mahfuz (The Supreme Preserved Tablet) and What Lies Before,” February 10, 2015, https://fgulen.com/en/fethullah-gulens-works/sufism/key-concepts-in-the-practice-of-sufism-4/47576-lawhun-mahfuz-the-supreme-preserved-tablet-and-what-lies-before.

4. Reza Shah-Kazemi, The Spirit of Tolerance in Islam (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 88–89.

5. Asma Afsaruddin, “Finding Common Ground: ‘Mutual Knowing,’ Moderation, and the Fostering of Religious Pluralism,” in Learned Ignorance, ed. Heft, Firestone, and Safi, 71. Qur’an 9:106 often served as a prooftext for irja.

6. Toby Mayer, “Traditions of Esoteric and Sapiential Quranic Commentary,” in The Study Quran, ed. Nasr, 1660–61. One hadith instructs, “The Qur’an is malleable, capable of many types of interpretation. Interpret it, therefore, according to the best possible type” (Mahmoud Ayoub, The Qur’an and Its Interpreters [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984], 1:23).

7. Cited in Charles Kurzman, “Liberal Islam and its Islamic Context,” in Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 16.

8. See Nasr, introduction to The Study Quran, xlv; Hussein Abdul-Raof, Schools of Qur’anic Exegesis (London: Routledge, 2013); Saeed Abdullah, Reading the Qur’an in the Twenty-First Century: A Contextualist Approach (London: Routledge, 2013), 17.

9. Ibn Arabi, The Meccan Revelations II.119.21, as translated in Reza Shah-Kazemi, “Beyond Polemics and Pluralism: The Universal Message of the Qur’an,” in Between Heaven and Hell: Islam, Salvation, and the Fate of Others, ed. Mohammad Hassan Khalil (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 93.

10. Qadhi, Introduction to the Sciences of the Qur’an, 207–31.

11. Ahmad Muhammad al-Tayyib, “The Quran as Source of Islamic Law,” in The Study Quran, ed. Nasr, 1717. See also Muhammad Hashim Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 2005), 109–56; Yaser Ellethy, Islam, Context, Pluralism and Democracy: Classical and Modern Interpretations (London: Routledge, 2014).

12. Cited in Brown, Hadith, 195.

13. Kurzman, “Liberal Islam and Its Islamic Context,” 5. See Ahmed El Shamsy, “The Social Construction of Orthodoxy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed. Tim Winter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 111–12, doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521780582.006.

14. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (London: Oneworld, 2014), 16.

15. See Muhammad Iqbal, “The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam,” in Liberal Islam, ed. Kurzman, 263; Intisar A. Rabb, Doubt in Islamic Law: A History of Legal Maxims, Interpretation, and Islamic Criminal Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 204, doi:10.1017/CBO9781139953054; Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 35. Geography had an impact: Hanifa (d. 767), for example, lived in Iraq. Being far from Medina, he could not rely on the Prophet’s direct legacy, so he emphasized reliable hadiths and made more space for independent legal reasoning.

16. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 50. Fiqh (jurisprudence) comes from the Arabic root for “understanding.”

17. Iqbal, “The Principle of Movement,” 261; Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 38.

18. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 189–98. Individuals seeking to expand women’s role within Islam today can point to Umm Waraqa (a female Companion of the Prophet), the female Hanbali scholar Fatima bint Abbas (d. 1315), and the practice of al-Tabari. Contemporary feminists like Amina Wadud first privileged Qur’an over tradition; later efforts (Intisar Rabb, Kecia Ali) often focused more on reclaiming the multiplicity within historical tradition.

19. Cited in Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 50. See Abu Amina Elias, “Shari’ah, Fiqh, and Islamic Law Explained,” April 13, 2013, https://abuaminaelias.com/sharia-fiqh-islamic-law.

20. El Shamsy, “Social Construction of Orthodoxy,” 107.

21. See Mohamed Arkoun, “Rethinking Islam Today,” in Liberal Islam, ed. Kurzman, 213–14; also Sherman Jackson, “Taqlid, Legal Scaffolding and the Scope of Legal Injunctions in Post-Formative Theory,” Islamic Law and Society 3:2 (1996): 165–92, doi:10.1163/1568519962599104.

22. Qur’an repeatedly instructs followers to establish justice, or enjoin right and forbid wrong (7:29, 3:104, 110, 114; 7:157; 9:71, 112; 22:41; 31:17). Scholars exercised powers of exclusion, disqualifying teachers’ opinions, banning books, prohibiting individuals from leading prayer, and convicting people of disbelief—a crime that could carry a death sentence. The state had power to appoint judges, carry out judgments, ban airing of certain ideas, etc. (El Shamsy, “Social Construction of Orthodoxy,” 108–15).

23. Toby Mayer, “Esoteric and Sapiential Quranic Commentary,” 1659. Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century reform movements that privileged Qur’an over sunna pursued progressive possibilities, while others utilized freedom from the constraints of tradition to produce exclusive, reactionary exegesis.

24. Cited in Ebrahim Moosa, “Arabic and Islamic Hermeneutics,” in The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. Jeff Malpas and Hans Helmuth-Gander (London: Routledge, 2015), 714. Omid Safi lamented the modern tendency to brand each other as infidels; see “Introduction: The Times They are a-Changin’—A Muslim Quest for Justice, Gender Equality, and Pluralism,” in Progressive Muslims: Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi (London: Oneworld, 2003), 13. Sulayman al-Wahhab (brother of Wahhabi Islam’s “founder”) cited fifty-two traditions that identified it as sinful (Khaled Abou El Fadl, “The Ugly Modern and the Modern Ugly: Reclaiming the Beautiful in Islam,” in Progressive Muslims, ed. Safi, 52).

25. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 116.

26. El Fadl, “The Ugly Modern,” 33–77; El Shamsy, “Social Construction of Orthodoxy,” 114. Ahmad S. Dallal in Islam Without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) argued that Muslim communities around the world were developing rich, plural intellectual traditions before the impact of European colonialism.

27. Arkoun, “Rethinking Islam Today,” 209. See other chapters in Kurzman, ed., Liberal Islam as well as Safi, ed., Progressive Muslims, 15–20, 33–77; Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 120.

28. Abdelhamid I. Sabra quoting Aporias Against Ptolemy in “Ibn al-Haytham,” Harvard Magazine (September–October 2003), http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/09/ibn-al-haytham-html.

29. Arkoun, “Rethinking Islam Today,” 220. See also Asharite author Abu Mansur al-Baghdadi’s (d. 1037) chapter, “What Is Known by Reason and What Is Known Only through Law,” in his Principles of Religion (Usul al-Din).

30. Andrey Smirnov, “Truth and Islamic Thought,” in A Companion to World Philosophies, ed. Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 444.

31. See Arthur Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008).

32. Abdulaziz Sachedina, Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 61, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195388428.001.0001.

33. Al-Tayyib, “The Quran as Source of Islamic Law,” 1698–1703.

34. Brown, Hadith, 25.

35. Iqbal, “The Principle of Movement,” 268. Mohammad Akram Khan (1868–1968) and other modern reformers insisted that the gates of ijtihad remained open at all times. Al-Jahiz (d. 868) contended that later generations inherited more edificatory admonition, giving them an advantage in self-critical assessment. See Ebrahim Moosa, “The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam,” in Progressive Muslims, ed. Safi, 113.

36. Brown, Hadith, 173. Authorities like Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149–1209) believed hadiths could not lead to certainty, only to presumption.

37. Rabb, Doubt in Islamic Law, 16, 28, 211, 185–221.

38. El Fadl, “The Ugly Modern,” 48–49.

39. See Aron Zysow, The Economy of Certainty: An Introduction to the Typology of Islamic Legal Theory (Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2013).

40. Nurcholish Madjid, “The Necessity of Renewing Islamic Thought and Reinvigorating Religious Understanding,” in Liberal Islam, ed. Kurzman, 290–91.

41. A fourth reference to strong drink describes it as a sign of Allah’s generous provision (16:67). See Nasr, The Study Quran, 211–212, 1703.

42. Ellethy, Islam, Context, Pluralism and Democracy, 49.

43. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 223.

44. The number of verses believed to be abrogated varies widely among Sunni scholars (5–214). Shi’a authorities apply naskh less frequently, Ahmadis reject the concept, and Mutazilites were disinclined to invoke it during the classical period. See Qur’an 2:106, 16:101, 13:39, 17:86; also Qadhi, An Introduction to the Sciences of the Qur’an, 232–56.

45. See Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2006), 45–47, 51–73.

46. See Looay Fatoohi, Abrogation in the Qur’an and Islamic Law (London: Routledge, 2012). One charting of the chronology of revelations is available at “Revelation Order,” Tanzil, http://tanzil.net/docs/revelation_order, although there is not unanimity.

47. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 97–102.

48. See Andrew Rippin, “Occasions of Revelation,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001–2006), doi:10.1163/1875–3922_q3_EQSIM_00305.

49. Wadud, Qur’an and Woman, 4.

50. Abdullah, Reading the Qur’an in the Twenty-First Century, 26–37. Hudud crimes include adultery, false accusation of adultery, theft, and highway robbery. Some authorities include apostasy and drinking alcohol, but they are not clearly specified with their punishments in the Qur’an. See Matthew Lippman et al., Islamic Criminal Law and Procedure (New York: Praeger, 1988), 39–41.

51. Farhang Rajaee, “Islam and Modernity: The Reconstruction of an Alternative Shi’ite Islamic Worldview in Iran,” in Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education, ed. Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 116.

52. Moosa, “Arabic and Islamic Hermeneutics,” 707.

53. Moosa, “The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam,” 112.

54. Ellethy, Islam, Context, Pluralism and Democracy, 46.

CHAPTER 6: SCRIPTURE IN THE CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT

1. Schüssler Fiorenza, Power of the Word, 264. See David Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 11.

2. Yehuda Amichai, HaZman [Time]: Poems (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 29.

3. Gamble, New Testament Canon, 92.

4. Paul F. Knitter, introduction to The Myth of Religious Superiority: A Multifaith Exploration (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), xi. More theologically conservative voices echo this principle; see Menachem Kellner, “Overcoming Chosenness,” in Covenant and Chosenness in Judaism and Mormonism, ed. Raphael Jospe, Truman Madsen, and Seth Ward (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 160; Joseph O’Leary, Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016), 4.

5. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, Divinity and Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003). John Dewey challenged modernism’s emphasis on unchanging and theoretical rather than dynamic and experiential knowledge (The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, The Gifford Lectures [New York: Paragon, 1979], 1929); see also Donna Haraway’s influential article, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14:3 (Fall 1988): 575–99, doi:10.2307/3178066.

6. Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 15–16.

7. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Feminist Revision and the Bible: The Unwritten Volume (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 122. She believed “the notion of religious tolerance was invented [eighteenth century] to keep the Christian sects from killing each other.”

8. Wayne A. Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 216.

9. See, e.g., Arthur F. McGovern, Liberation Theology and Its Critics: Toward an Assessment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 30–46.

10. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, “The Tasks and Traditions of Interpretation,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Qurān, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 202–3, doi:10.1017/CCOL0521831601.010.

11. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 162. It is comparable to the view of Nachmanides, discussed in chap. 3, that Jewish scholars constitute the tradition with their interpretations.

12. See N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible for Today (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 5–6; Joseph Runzo, “Pluralism and Relativism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Diversity, ed. Chad Meister (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 61–76, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195340136.003.0005.

13. Smith, The Bible Made Impossible, 3–26, 149–153. See also Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 16–19.

14. Janet Jakobsen utilized queer theory, with its decentering of normativity, for a critical lens on pluralism (“Ethics After Pluralism,” in After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, ed. Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen [New York: Columbia University Press, 2010], 31–58).

15. Paul Ricoeur, foreword to Tolerance Between Intolerance and the Intolerable (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), 1.

16. John D. Inazu, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 83–92.

17. See Lewis Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 119.

18. Proclamation 5018 (Feb. 3, 1983), Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan 1983, 179.

19. See Nina Totenberg, “Supreme Court Appears Ready to Let Cross Stand but Struggles with Church-State Test,” National Public Radio, February 27, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/02/27/697708856/supreme-court-to-decide-fate-of-world-war-i-memorial-cross-on-public-land; “Religious Displays on Government Property,” Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-1/religious-displays-on-government-property.

20. Kent Faulk, “Roy Moore Timeline: Ten Commandments to Gay Marriage Stance,” Al.com, May 7, 2016, modified January 13, 2019, www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2016/05/roy_moore_timeline_ten_command.html.

21. Formal swearing-in is collective, without scripture; see Jan Crawford-Greenburg, “Quran to Be Used for Ellison’s Swearing-In,” December 1, 2006, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2694106&page=1. For discussion of the Islamophobia industry, see Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Hatred of Muslims, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2017).

22. Barton Swaim, “The Pitfalls of Politicians Citing Verses,” Washington Post, December 2, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/02/if-a-2016-candidate-is-citing-a-bible-verse-theres-a-good-chance-its-not-quite-right.

23. Julie Zauzmer and Keith McMillan, “Sessions Cites Bible Passage Used to Defend Slavery in Defense of Separating Immigrant Families,” Washington Post, June 15, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/06/14/jeff-sessions-points-to-the-bible-in-defense-of-separating-immigrant-families.

24. Lincoln Mullen, “The Fight to Define Romans 13,” Atlantic, June 15, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/romans-13/562916.

25. Ahad Ha’am, “Perurim” [Crumbs], 1892, as cited in Shavit and Eran, Hebrew Bible Reborn, 521–22.

26. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality, 217.

CHAPTER 7: A MATRIX OF DANGEROUS RELIGIOUS IDEAS

1. See Shaye Cohen’s discussion of Hellenism and the shifting nature of religious identity in The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 104–5, 136.

2. Jeremy Cott, “The Biblical Problem of Election,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 21:2 (1984): 204.

3. Avalos, Fighting Words; see also Schwartz, The Curse of Cain.

4. Tim Winter, “The Last Trump Card: Islam and the Supersession of Other Faiths,” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 9:2 (1992): 145–46. The Qu’ranic inscription inside the Dome of the Rock addresses Christian theological claims, denying the divinity of Jesus and triune nature of God (4:171).

5. De Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica Indiana, as cited in John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World: A Study of the Writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525–1604) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 13.

6. John Cotton, Gods Promise to His Plantation (London: William Jones, 1630), http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=etas.

7. Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2012), 17–19.

8. Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 246. See Rachel S. Mikva, “The Change a Difference Makes,” in Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-Faith Academy, ed. David S. Cunningham (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), 26–27.

9. Henri Tajfel and John Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict,” in The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1979), 33–47. See David Berreby, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (New York: Little, Brown, 2005).

10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. Roger Masters, trans. Judith Masters (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1978), 131–32.

11. William Scott Green, “Otherness Within: Towards a Theory of Difference in Rabbinic Judaism,” in “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity, ed. Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 50–51. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 332. For the role of identity formation in early Jewish–Christian relationships, see Boyarin, Border Lines; Leonard V. Rutgers, Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2009); Adiel Schremer, Brothers Estranged: Heresy, Christianity, and Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010).

12. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993), 14.

13. Smith, Relating Religion, 245.

14. Alar Kilp, “Religion in the Construction of the Cultural ‘Self’ and ‘Other,’” ENDC Proceedings 14 (2012): 197, https://www.ksk.edu.ee/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/KVUOA_Toimetised_14_9_alar_kilp.pdf.

15. See Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades of Heinrich Bullinger and William Gouge, God’s Three Arrowes, cited in Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Re-evaluation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1960), 165–72; Elimelekh Horowitz, “Midoro shel Moshe ad doro shel Mashiah: hayehudim mul ‘Amalek’ v’gilgulav [From the Generation of Moses to the Generation of the Messiah: The Jews Confront ‘Amalek’ and His Incarnations],” Zion 64:4 (1999): 429; Robert Eisen, The Peace and Violence of Judaism: From the Bible to Modern Zionism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 152.

16. Farid Esack, “The Portrayal of Jews and the Possibilities for Their Salvation in the Qur’an,” in Between Heaven and Hell, ed. Khalil, 230.

CHAPTER 8: CHOSENNESS IN JUDAISM

1. See Hebrews 11:4; Philo, The Sacrifices of Cain and Abel 52; Ephraem, Commentary on Genesis 3.2.1; Gen Rab. 22:5.

2. See Joel Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob: Reclaiming the Biblical Concept of Election (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 23–27.

3. R. Kendall Soulen argued that God’s work as Consummator of creation is bound up with this “economy of mutual blessing” exemplified in the election of Israel, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 111–12. Contemporary critique sees Joseph’s management of the food crisis as problematic: the process dispossesses landowners in Egypt and may kindle the fires of tyranny that ultimately engulf the Israelites.

4. See Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), 72–96.

5. Abraham is described as a friend of God in Isaiah 41:8 and 2 Chronicles 20:7 (also James 2:23). See Bernhard W. Anderson, “Abraham, the Friend of God,” Interpretation 42:4 (1988): 353–66, doi:10.1177/002096438804200403. The promise of kingship abiding in David’s house is similarly viewed as a covenant of friendship, linked to chosenness (see Ps. 89:4, 2 Sam. 7:8–16).

6. Jon D. Levenson, The Universal Horizon of Biblical Particularism (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1985), 147. See Genesis 6:16–9:17 for the biblical narrative of Noah; cf. Qur’an 11:25–49, 23:23–30, and sura 71.

7. The priestly authors underscore the notion of holiness (kedushah), sanctification established through distinctive praxis: “You shall be holy to Me, for I YHWH am holy, and I have set you apart from the peoples to be Mine” (Lev. 20:26).

8. Seock-Tae Sohn, The Divine Election of Israel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001), explored these images in detail.

9. Berit olam (eternal covenant) appears a dozen times in Tanakh; see Steven Mason, “Eternal Covenant” in the Pentateuch (London: T&T Clark, 2008). Tanakh also records, however, feelings of abandonment during times of suffering, e.g., Isa. 33:7–8, Jer. 7:29–34, Pss. 13, 44.

10. Levenson, Universal Horizon, 160. For discussion of race in antiquity, see Cain Hope Felder, Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 127–45.

11. Rabbinic tradition imagined that Abraham and Sarah gather followers from the surrounding populations (Gen. Rab. 39:14). Formal conversion is a postbiblical development, but non-Israelites join the community in various ways.

12. Ammonites and Moabites are not similarly welcomed, likely due to enduring conflict. Jeffrey Tigay noted that Deuteronomy “expects foreigners to visit and trade with Israel, and permits most (including escaped slaves) to settle in Israel, marry Israelites, and eventually to join the popular Assembly” (The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996], xvi).

13. Ezra twists a phrase from Isaiah 6:13, who sees a returning remnant as the seed that can regrow the decimated nation. Nehemiah 13 also resists exogamy, but on pragmatic grounds.

14. Cott, “Biblical Problem of Election,” 205–7. Instructions such as “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 23:9) and “Love the stranger as yourself” (Lev. 19:34) are repeated over thirty times in Tanakh.

15. Haman also offers to pay a large sum of money if the king agrees to order the Jews’ destruction.

16. See Millard C. Lind, Yahweh Is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient Israel (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2001); Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993), 143–49.

17. Only a few Canaanite cities appear to have been destroyed around the time of the Israelite conquest; see William Dever, Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 56–61. Exodus 23 and 34 command exiling the Canaanites instead. Passages in Joshua, Judges, and Kings indicate that they remained in the land, and abiding temptation to participate in Canaanite cultic worship is evident throughout Tanakh.

18. Child sacrifice and sorcery are identified as some of their abhorrent practices (Deut. 12:31, 18:9–12).

19. Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob, 107–36.

20. Robert Eisen, The Peace and Violence of Judaism, 15–64.

21. Jeffrey Tigay identified Celts, Gauls, Teutons, and Romans among those who proscribed enemy populations (JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy, 538); see also “The Moabite Stone” in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed., ed. James Pritchard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 320.

22. Eisen, The Peace and Violence of Judaism, 81–88. See Robert Goldenberg, “The Destruction of the Temple: Its Meanings and Consequences,” in Volume 4 of The Cambridge History of Judaism, ed. Steven Katz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 191–205; David Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 51–221; Reuven Kimelman, “Nonviolence in the Talmud,” Judaism 17:3 (1968): 316–33; Aviezer Ravitzky, History and Faith: Studies in Jewish Philosophy (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1996), 22–45.

23. See Moshe Greenberg, HaSegulah vehaKoach [Particularity and Power] (Kibbutz Hameuhad, 1986), 20.

24. Reuven Firestone, Holy War in Judaism: The Fall and Rise of a Controversial Idea (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 77–89. The categorization is first recorded in m. Sotah 8:7; it is further developed in the Talmuds and later halakhic literature.

25. Attitudes about destruction of the Amalekites are less clear. Many medieval rabbinic authorities placed restrictions on the command or treated it as moot, but others saw it as an abiding mitzvah. See Avi Sagi, “The Punishment of Amalek in Jewish Tradition: Coping with the Moral Problem,” Harvard Theological Review 87:3 (1994): 323–45, doi:10.1017/S0017816000030753.

26. See Rachel S. Mikva, “Brer Rabbit and the Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem,” Comparative Literature Studies 53:1 (2016): 6–12.

27. Cf. Gen. Rab. 83:5. See Burton Visotzky, “Anti-Christian Polemic in Leviticus Rabbah,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 56 (1990): 88–100; Adam Gregerman, Building on the Ruins of the Temple (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016).

28. See William Scott Green, “What’s in a Name? The Problematic of Rabbinic ‘Biography,’” in Approaches to Ancient Judaism I (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1978), 77–96; Jacob Neusner, “From History to Hermeneutics: The Talmud as a Historical Source,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 11:2 (2008): 200–27.

29. For discussion of non-Jews in rabbinic literature, see Gary Porton, Goyim: Gentiles and Israelites in Mishnah-Tosefta (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); Sacha Stern, Jewish Identity in Early Rabbinic Writings (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Richard Kalmin, “Christians and Heretics in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity,” Harvard Theological Review 87:2 (1994): 155–69, doi:10.1017/S0017816000032764; Christine Hayes, “The ‘Other’ in Rabbinic Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 243–69.

30. The descendants of Noah received seven commandments: establish laws and prohibit blasphemy, idolatry, adultery, bloodshed, theft, and consuming the blood of a living animal (b. Sanh. 56a). See David Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism: The Idea of Noahide Law (Oxford, UK: Littmann Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011).

31. Ruth Langer, “The Censorship of Aleinu in Ashkenaz and its Aftermath,” in The Experience of Jewish Liturgy, ed. Debra Reed Blank (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 147–66, doi:10.1163/9789004208032_010; Cursing the Christians? A History of Birkat haMinim (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011). Justin Martyr’s complaint that Jewish liturgy cursed Christians (Dialogue with Trypho 16:4; cf. 47:4, 96:2) is no longer presumed to describe this late text. His comments may have been designed to produce alienation rather than reflect it (Boyarin, Border Lines, 67–74).

32. Shlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1996), 26, 99. The quote is from an anonymous Mainz chronicle.

33. T. Carmi, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 372 (an anonymous dirge for the Mainz martyrs).

34. Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial, trans. Judah Goldin (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1993), 135–37.

35. Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, 65. Christians also wrote Crusader chronicles with martyrological themes linked to election. See Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 29.

36. See Michael Meerson and Peter Schäfer, eds., Toledot Yeshu (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014); Hillel Newman, “The Death of Jesus in the Toledot Yeshu Literature,” Journal of Theological Studies 50:1 (1999): 59–63, doi:10.1093/jts/50.1.59. The earliest extant manuscript is from the eleventh century. Non-Jews used the texts to indict Judaism; see Martin Lockshin, “Translation as Polemic,” in Minḥah le-Naḥum: Biblical and Other Studies Presented to Nahum M. Sarna in Honour of His 70th Birthday, ed. Marc Brettler and Michael Fishbane (Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1993), 226–92. Christian sources also portrayed Jesus as a magician; see Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (San Francisco: Hampton Roads, 2014).

37. David Biale, “Counter-History and Jewish Polemic against Christianity: The Sefer toldot yeshu and the Sefer zerubavel,” Jewish Social Studies 6 (1999): 130–45.

38. Joseph Kimchi, Sefer haBrit [Book of the Covenant], trans. Frank Talmadge (Toronto: Mediaeval Institute of Pontifical Studies, 1972), 65.

39. Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 160. See also Prosper Murciano, “Keshet uMagen: A Critical Edition” (PhD diss., New York University, 1975); Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages (Oxford, UK: Littman Library, 2007).

40. HaLevi, Kuzari, Book One 27.1, 103.1, 115.3. See Robert Eisen, Gersonides on Providence, Covenant, and the Chosen People (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 172–78.

41. Saadia Gaon, Emunot veDeot, Article 2. See The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 125–26.

42. See his Talmud commentary, Beit haBekhira, on b. B. Qam. 37b, 113a–b, b. B. Metz. 59a, b. Avod. Zar. 26a, and b. Hor. 11a for a range of his rulings and reasoning; also Moshe Halbertal, “‘Ones Possessed of Religion’: Religious Tolerance in the Teachings of the Me’iri,” Edah 1:1 (2000): 1–24. Isaac Arama (1420–94) similarly suggested that righteous Jews and non-Jews are spiritually identical (Akedat Yitzhak 20).

43. Maimonides wrote to Ovadiah the proselyte: You are just like any native-born Jew . . . for Abraham is your spiritual father, and our inheritance is yours as well, since there is no racial distinction in our faith” (Responsa II: 293). See Menahem Kellner, Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), 92–94.

44. Maimonides, Mishnah Torah, Melachim 11.4. Parts of this passage were sometimes eliminated by Christian censors. Jacob Emden (1697–1796, Germany) also wrote that “the Nazarene” did much good by leading Gentiles to embrace Torah and move away from idolatry (Seder Olam Rabbah v’Zuta).

45. Unbelieving Arab contemporaries similarly accused Muhammad of being a madman (majnun). See Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 154.

46. Maimonides, Epistle to Yemen, trans. Boaz Cohen, reprinted in A Maimonides Reader, ed. Isadore Twersky (Springfield, NJ: Behrman House, 1972), 439. See also Menachem Kellner, “Chosenness, Not Chauvinism,” in A People Apart, ed. David Frank (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 51–75; Ibn Kammuna, Examination of the Three Faiths: A Thirteenth-Century Essay in Comparative Study of Religion, trans. Moshe Perlman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). The Jewish author had to flee Baghdad after an imam attacked it for its criticisms of Islam and riots broke out; he was condemned to death in absentia.

47. Brueggemann, Reverberations of Faith: A Theological Handbook of Old Testament Themes (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 63.

48. Jonathan Sacks, Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2007), 45–66.

49. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 130, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511809637.007.

50. See Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 147–50; Anders Runesson, “Particularistic Judaism and Universal Christianity? Some Critical Remarks on Terminology and Theology,” Studia Theologica 54:1 (2000): 58, doi:10.1080/003933800750041520.

51. Sacks, Dignity of Difference, 50–52.

52. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 97.

53. Beth A. Berkowitz, Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 41–59, doi:10.1017/CBO 9781139005159. The rabbis debated degrees of Hellenization; see Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 103–75.

54. See Special Laws 1.33, 2.162–67, On the Life of Moses 1.148, On the Posterity of Cain and His Exile 91–93, On Abraham 98. Also Ellen Birnbaum, The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought: Israel, Jews, and Proselytes (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1996).

55. Kaufmann Kohler, Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 323. Also Sforno (c. 1475–1550) on Exod. 19:5–6: God loves all the peoples of the world, especially the righteous; Israel is called to teach humanity so that all may serve God together.

56. Leo Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, as cited in Ze’ev Levy, “Judaism and Chosenness: On Some Controversial Aspects from Spinoza to Contemporary Jewish Thought,” in A People Apart: Chosenness and Ritual in Jewish Philosophical Thought, ed. Daniel H. Frank (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 101.

57. Cited in Renzo Fabris, “Modern Man and the Concept of the Chosen People,” in Seeds of Reconciliation: Essays on Jewish-Christian Understanding, ed. Katharine T. Hargrove (North Richland Hills, TX: BIBAL Press, 1996), 100.

58. Irving Greenberg, Living in the Image of God: Jewish Teaching to Perfect the World (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998), 79. See David Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Soulen, God of Israel and Christian Theology; Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob; Avi Beker, The Chosen: The History of an Idea, and the Anatomy of an Obsession (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Reuven Firestone, Who Are the Real Chosen People? The Meaning of Chosenness in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths, 2008); Joel Lohr, Chosen and Unchosen: Conceptions of Election in the Pentateuch and Jewish-Christian Interpretation (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009).

59. The passage uses prooftexts from 1 Sam. 2:27, Isa. 43:14, and Deut. 30:3 to support the claim. Regarding the last of these, the Talmud notes that the verse states “God will return,” not “God will cause to return.”

60. Also Sifre Deut. 308: Even though you are full of blemishes, you are God’s children. Rabbi Yehudah ostensibly maintained that Israel could lose its elect position for failing to behave as “children of the Lord,” but it was a minority opinion that seemed to fade away (Sifre Deut. 96).

61. Regarding chosenness of the land of Israel, see David Novak, Zionism and Judaism: A New Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); W. D. Davies, The Territorial Dimension of Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

62. Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology, 8, building on the reasoning of Michael Wyschogrod.

63. See David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 56–62 for an insightful reading of the passage.

64. The notion that any Jew could impact the cosmos through performance of mitzvot was transformative for the refugees expelled from Spain in 1492 (Rachel Elior, Jewish Mysticism: The Infinite Expression of Freedom [Oxford, UK: Littman Library, 2009], 1–32).

CHAPTER 9: ELECTION IN CHRISTIANITY

1. Mary is told that her son will sit on the throne of his father David (Luke 1:32). Echoing Abraham’s trial, Jesus must go into the wilderness as soon as his election is announced (Mark 1:9–13). Jesus warns his listeners that they will be afflicted for their faith (Matt. 5, Mark 13). One who asks Jesus how to acquire eternal life is told to follow the commandments (Matt. 19, Mark 10).

2. Many ideas that became central in early Christianity were part of the Jewish conceptual universe at the time, and both religions were profoundly impacted by Hellenism. See E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977); Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003); Hans-Josef Klauck, The Religious Context of Early Christianity: A Guide to Greco-Roman Religions (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: New Press, 2012).

3. See J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Essence of Paul’s Thought (Fortress, 1980), 59–93.

4. See, e.g., Shaye J. D. Cohen’s introduction to Galatians in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Mark Zvi Brettler (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 373–74. Claims about the status of the Jewish covenant still ignites controversy; see Tom Heneghan, “Retired Pope Benedict Accused of Anti-Semitism after Article on Christians and Jews,” National Catholic Reporter, August 6, 2018, https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/retired-pope-benedict-accused-anti-semitism-after-article-christians-and-jews.

5. Similarly, Malachi’s call of “Have we not all one father?” (2:10) sounds universalist but is primarily making a case for Jewish unity. The Galatians passage follows Paul’s dispute with Peter for sitting separately from Gentile followers (2:11–21).

6. Scholars debate catalysts and timing of the “parting of the ways,” with growing conviction that separation from Judaism was a protracted process. See Annette H. Reed and Adam Becker, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007). Abel Bibliowicz asserted that Christian anti-Judaism grew out of internal conflict in the Jesus movement in Jews and Gentiles in the Early Jesus Movement: An Unintended Journey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

7. Paul affirmed the law for Jewish believers in Jesus and access without it for Gentile believers. Recent scholarship emphasizes Paul’s continuing identification as a Jew, e.g., John Gager, Who Made Early Christianity? The Jewish Lives of the Apostle Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

8. “The law” is a poor rendering of Torah (literally “instruction”), playing into historical bias that Judaism is legalistic. The Koine Greek term nomos may capture a fuller semantic range, but it was flattened in patristic writings.

9. Origen wrote in Homilies on Leviticus 7.5.5, “For even in the Gospels, it is the letter that kills.” Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, refuted Christian scholars who misrepresent late antique Judaism as concerned with “works” righteousness.

10. Cf. Exod. 19:6, Deut. 14:2, Hosea 2:2 to see how it incorporates language from Tanakh.

11. See Runesson, “Particularistic Judaism and Universalistic Christianity?” 58–60; Denise Kimber Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition,” Harvard Theological Review 94:4 (2001): 449–76, doi:10.1017/S0017816001038044.

12. See Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons, eds., Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965–1982 (New York: Crossroad, 1986); Krister Stendahl, “From God’s Perspective We Are All Minorities,” Journal of Religious Pluralism 2 (1993): 4.

13. In The Fate of the Unrepentant: A Study of Biblical Themes of Fire and Being Consumed (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 200), 52–55, Webb Mealy argued that eternal destruction means they cease to exist after death. Others maintain that the Greek term is best rendered by its English cognate (aeon), indicating a long period rather than eternity.

14. On conversion to Judaism in the late Second Temple period, see Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 129–62; Carleton Paget, “Jewish Proselytism at the Time of Christian Origins: Chimera or Reality?,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 18:62 (1996): 65–103, doi:10.1177/0142064X9601806204.

15. See Norman Beck, Mature Christianity in the 21st Century: The Recognition and Repudiation of the Anti-Jewish Polemic of the New Testament (New York: Crossroad, 1994); Paula Fredriksen and Adele Reinhartz, eds., Jesus, Judaism and Christian Anti-Judaism: Reading the New Testament in a Post-Holocaust World (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002).

16. Smith, Relating Religion, 245; see chap. 7 above.

17. Note Birger A. Pearson, “1 Thessalonians 2:13–16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpolation,” Harvard Theological Review 64 (1971): 79–94, doi:10.1017/S0017816000018046.

18. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 230.

19. See W. R. Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994). Francisco Lozada and Greg Carey, eds., Soundings in Cultural Criticism: Perspectives and Methods in Culture, Power, and Identity in the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013).

20. Calvin J. Roetzl, “Election/Calling in Certain Pauline Letters: An Experimental Construction,” in Society for Biblical Literature 1990 Seminar Papers, ed. David J. Lull (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 556.

21. See Michel Desjardins, Peace, Violence and the New Testament (London: T&T Clark, 1997).

22. Gregory of Nyssa, De anima et resurrectione 46, Oratia catechetica 26; Clement, Stromata 7.2, 16; Origen, De principiis 3.6.6 (elsewhere he asserted limits). See Acts 3:21; Brian Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

23. Such mystics include Isaac the Syrian (seventh century), Amalric of Bena (died c. 1207), Julian of Norwich (d. 1416). Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker reviewed Christian universalists dating from seventeenth-century England in Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston: Beacon, 2008), 389–98. Numerous pluralist Christian theologies have emerged in recent decades.

24. The Wisdom of St. Isaac the Syrian, trans. Sebastian Brock (Oxford, UK: SLG Press, 1997), loc. 78–88, 307–320.

25. On the Gospel of St. John 86 (c. 419 CE). Cf. Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between God’s love, which causes good, versus our own which is incited by good that already exists (Summa Theologica I.23.4).

26. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 11.

27. Paul identifies the seed of Abraham, written in the singular in Genesis 15:15, as Jesus (Gal. 3:16). See also Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter 46; Irenaeus (130–202 CE), Against Heresies 4.21.

28. See Jon D. Levenson, Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 198–219.

29. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.33. John of Damascus identified the tree in Eden as Jesus’s cross: “For since death was by a tree, it is fitting that life and resurrection are bestowed by a tree” (Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4.11).

30. The suffering servant motif is already absorbed in New Testament (Matt. 8:17, Acts 8:32–35).

31. Augustine, Contra Faustum 19:9–10.

32. Augustine, On the Gospel of St. John 11.8: “The former people is a figure for the present people. For in the Jewish people was figured the Christian people. There a figure, here the truth.”

33. Tertullian, Adversus Judaeos 5.

34. Augustine, Contra Faustum 12:9–14. Cf. On the Gospel of St. John 9.11.1, 11.7.2, The City of God 15.26.

35. See 2 Corinthians 3:13–16; Daniel Boyarin, “Subversion of the Jews: Moses’ Veil and the Hermeneutics of Supersession,” Diacritics 23:2 (1993): 16–35. Alexandrian exegesis pursued typological readings more than the Antiochene school.

36. Soulen constructed a framework analyzing Christian ideas of supersession. Economic supersession maintains that carnal Israel was providentially ordered from the outset to become obsolete. Punitive supersession contends God punished Israel for its sinfulness, including refusal to embrace Christ. Structural supersession renders the “Old” Testament indecisive for Christian theology in imagining God’s redemptive plan; the essential narratives become creation, the “fall,” the incarnation of Jesus, and the final consummation, bypassing entirely God’s involvement with the people of Israel (The God of Israel and Christian Theology, 28–33).

37. See Augustine, Contra Faustum and Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

38. See, for instance, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, Cyprian’s Three Books of Testimonies Against the Jews, John Chrysostom’s and Tertullian’s Adversus Judaeos. For a compilation of polemical literature, see Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1988–1994). Christian tropes also adopted Hellenistic barbs, appropriating dominant modes of cultural power; see Andrew Jacobs, “The Lion and the Lamb: Reconsidering Jewish-Christian Relations in Antiquity,” in The Ways That Never Parted, ed. Becker and Reed, 95–118.

39. David Nirenberg, “Slay Them Not: A Review of Paula Fredriksen’s Augustine and the Jews,” New Republic 240:4 (March 18, 2009): 42–47. See Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 306–7; Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 2–3; Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Leiden: Brill, 1994).

40. See Amnon Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988); Jacob Rader Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook, 315–1791 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1938), 3–7. Note also Norman Golb, “Jewish Proselytism—A Phenomenon in the Religious History of Early Medieval Europe,” March 3, 1987, http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/jewish_proselytism.pdf.

41. “The Edict of Expulsion of the Jews,” trans. Edward Peters, Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, http://www.sephardicstudies.org/decree.html.

42. Jerusha Lamptey [Rhodes], Never Wholly Other: A Muslima Theology of Religious Pluralism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2, doi:10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199362783.001.0001.

43. Ibn Ishaq (704–68) provided the earliest extant record; see Martin Lings, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006), 81–84.

44. See David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 16.

45. See David Thomas, ed. and trans., Early Muslim Polemic against Christianity: Abu Isa al-Warraq’s “Against the Incarnation” (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14–15.

46. Risâlat al-Kindi, Dialogue islamo-chrétien sous le Calife al-Ma’mûn (813–834): Les épitres d’Al-Hashimî et d’Al-Kindî, trans. Georges Tatar (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1985).

47. John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 23.

48. See Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

49. Wolfgang Seiferth, Synagogue and Church in the Middle Ages: Two Symbols in Art and Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1970), 5–7, 95–109, figs. 5, 31, 35–37.

50. Cited in Constant J. Mews, “Abelard and Heloise on Jews and Hebraica Veritas,” in Christian Attitudes toward Jews in the Middle Ages, ed. Michael Frassetto (London: Routledge, 2007), 83. Cf. Marc Saperstein, “Christians and Jews: Some Positive Images,” Harvard Theological Review 79:1/3 (1986): 237, doi:10.1017/S0017816000020502.

51. Mews, “Abelard and Heloise,” 96.

52. Tolan, Saracens, 175–78; Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths, 26.

53. Rita George-Tvrtković, A Christian Pilgrim in Medieval Iraq: Riccoldo Montecroce’s Encounter with Islam (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012).

54. Martin Luther, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” https://www.uni-due.de/collcart/es/sem/s6/txt09_1.htm.

55. Martin Luther, The Christian in Society IV, vol. 47 of Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). See Adam S. Francisco, Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics (Leiden: Brill, 2007), doi:10.1163/ej.9789004160439.i–260.

56. Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 115.

57. Jeremy M. Schott, Christianity, Empire and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3–4, 69–76.

58. See George Kalantzis, Caesar and the Lamb (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 97–147; Lisa Sowle Cahill, Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994), 41–54.

59. Christians served in the Roman army by the second century; Athanasius (296–373) and Basil of Caesarea (330–379) wrote in support of their participation. See Louis J. Swift, The Early Fathers on War and Military Service (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1984), 93–95; James Turner Johnson, The Quest for Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); David Hunter, “A Decade of Research on Early Christians and Military Service,” Religious Studies Review 18:2 (1992): 87–94, doi:10.1111/j.1748–0922.1992.tb00084.x.

60. Symmachus, Relatio 3.10, Themistius Orations 68d–69a. Augustine wrote, “Union with wisdom is not achieved by a single road,” but he later retracted it citing, “I am the way” (Retractiones 1.4.3).

61. Alexei M. Sivertsev, Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 10. Cf. Henry Chadwick, “Christian and Roman Universalism in the Fourth Century,” in Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy, ed. Lionel Wickham and Caroline Bammel (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 26–42.

62. See The Theodosian Code, book 16. Constantius II and Theodosius I were the first emperors to persecute pagans.

63. Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1, 191. Note Romans 8:33–34: “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies; who is to condemn?”

64. Severus of Minorca, Letter on the Conversion of the Jews 31.3–4, trans. Scott Bradbury (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), 125.

65. For an anthology on just war theory, see Arthur Holmes, ed., War and Christian Ethics: Classic and Contemporary Readings on the Morality of War (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005).

66. See Swift, The Early Fathers on War, 149–54; Frances Young, “The Early Church: Military Service, War and Peace,” Theology 92:750 (1989): 491–503.

67. Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 85–98, 173–78; The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom 1000–1500 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn corroborated his intervention. See James Brundage, The Crusades: A Documentary History (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1962), 115–121; Cohen, Living Letters, 73–94.

68. Robert the Monk, Historia Hierosolymitana, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/urban2-5vers.asp#robert. His record was composed approximately twenty-five years after the fact; no contemporaneous record of the speech survives.

69. Christophe T. Maier, Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 15.

70. Nicholas of Cusa on Interreligious Harmony: Text, Concordance and Translation of De Pace Fidei, ed. and trans. James Biechler and H. Lawrence Bond (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1991), 1.2.

71. See Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments and Contemporary Meanings (New York: Paulist Press, 2002), 40–42.

72. See Brinley Rees, Pelagius: Life and Letters (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1998).

73. Commentarius in Epistolam ad Romanos, ed. Éloi Marie Buytaert, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 11 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1969), 114–17; Mews, “Abelard and Heloise,” 92. See also Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

74. Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise, 84–114. Noting that Church art before the ninth century emphasized images of idyllic gardens, not crucifixions, they claimed the myth of redemptive violence did not overtake Christianity until later.

75. Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine, 3rd ed., ed. and trans. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay (Clifton, NJ: Reference Book Publishers, 1966), 121, 295, 301.

76. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley and Thomas Torrence (London: T&T Clark, 1957). See Soulen, God of Israel and Christian Theology; Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003); Sallie McFague, Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001).

77. Examples include John Hick, God Has Many Names (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980); John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987); Monica A. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008); Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002); Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Religious Pluralism and Interreligious Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017); John R. Franke, Manifold Witness: The Plurality of Truth (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009).

78. Candida Moss, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 19–20, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199739875.001.0001.

79. Tripp York, The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2007).

80. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 72.

81. The Martyrdom of St. Polycarp, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/richardson/fathers.vii.i.iii.html. Texts often exaggerated and invented stories of Christian martyrdom in stylized rewritings of “noble death” traditions; see Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).

82. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 1.

83. Patrick M. Erben, “Book of Suffering, Suffering Book: The Mennonite Martyrs’ Mirror and the Translation of Martyrdom in Colonial America,” in Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, ed. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 195.

84. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).

85. James H. Cone, A Black Liberation Theology, 40th Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 2, 67, 59.

86. Don A. Pittman, Ruben L. F. Habito, and Terry C. Muck, eds., Ministry and Theology in Global Perspective: Contemporary Challenges for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 223. For postcolonial understandings of Christian mission, see David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011); Brian McLaren, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World (New York: Jericho, 2012).

CHAPTER 10: DIVINE GUIDANCE IN ISLAM

1. A related concept is found in rabbinic thought: “Fulfilling one commandment (mitzvah) leads to [fulfillment of another] commandment” (m. Avot 4:2).

2. Mattson, Story of the Qur’an, 56–57.

3. See Winter, “Last Trump Card,” 137–45. Cf. William Adler, “The Jews as Falsifiers: Charges of Tendentious Emendations in Anti-Jewish Christian Polemics,” Translation of Scripture-JQR Supplement (1990): 1–27.

4. Shahrastani (d. 1153) and Nawawi (thirteenth century) were among commentators who saw previous revelations as invalid. See Camilla Adang, Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: From Ibn Rabban to Ibn Hazm (Leiden: Brill 1996); Winter, “Last Trump Card,” 146. Joseph Lumbard cited 5:43, 47; 16:43; and 48:29, challenging such uses of naskh (Study Qur’an, 1767–68). See Fatoohi, Abrogation in the Qur’an, 68–69.

5. See commentary in Nasr, Study Quran, 276; Reuven Firestone, “Is There a Notion of ‘Divine Election’ in Qur’an,” New Perspectives on the Qur’an, ed. Gabriel Said Reynolds (London: Routledge, 2011), 404–7.

6. See commentary in Nasr, Study Quran, pp. 153–54, and discussion of primordial religion below.

7. Firestone, “Is There a Notion of ‘Divine Election,’” 406–7.

8. Maulana Muhammad Ali (1874–1951), The Holy Qur’an with English Translation and Commentary (Dublin, OH: Ahamadiyya Anjuman Ishaat Islam, 2002), 863.

9. Islamic tradition denies that Jesus was among the prophets who were killed, by the Jews or by the Roman authorities. Instead, he was lifted up to dwell with God (Qur’an 4:157–58).

10. Cf. 2:65–66, 7:166, 5:82–83. Exegetes debate whether to interpret the image metaphorically or literally, but both dehumanize Jews. See Esack, “The Portrayal of Jews,” 207–33; Amir Hussein, “Muslims, Pluralism and Interfaith Dialogue,” in Progressive Muslims, ed. Safi, 254.

11. Commentary generally interprets this to mean that shirk is not forgiven unless wrongdoers repent. See http://m.qtafsir.com/Surah-An-Nisa/Allah-Does-not-Forgive-Shirk.

12. See discussion of dhimmitude below.

13. E.g., Makki b. Abi Talib (eleventh century), Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi (twelfth century). See Fatoohi, Abrogation in the Qur’an, 114–21.

14. For discussion of nonviolence in Islam, see Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam: Theory and Practice (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). For all three traditions, see Thistlethwaite, Interfaith Just Peacemaking.

15. See Abdulaziz Sachedina, “The Qur’an and Other Religions,” in Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an, ed. McAuliffe, 296–97. Traditional exegesis applied such statements only to converts to Islam, but some modern readers challenge this conclusion; see Mahmoud Ayoub, “Nearest in Amity: Christians in the Qur’an and Contemporary Exegetical Tradition,” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 8:2 (1997): 145–64.

16. Sachedina, “Qur’an and Other Religions,” 294. Cf. Mohammad Fadel, “‘No Salvation Outside Islam’: Muslim Modernists, Democratic Politics, and Islamic Theological Exclusivism,” in Between Heaven and Hell, ed. Khalil, 35–61.

17. Similar notions of God settling religious disputes on the Day of Rising appear in 2:113, 22:17, and 10:93, but without asserting that religious difference is part of God’s plan. A darker version of human difference proclaims that conflicts “will fill up Hell with the jinn and mankind all together” (11:118–19).

18. Jonathan P. Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 72–74. Contemporaneous Syriac sources refer to Muhammad as king of the Arabs, not a religious prophet.

19. Wink, “The Myth of Redemptive Violence,” 3:278; see discussion in chap. 1.

20. The Fatamids extended dhimmi status to a broader range of religious others.

21. See Caner Dagli, “Conquest and Conversion, War and Peace in the Qur’an,” in Study Qur’an, ed. Nasr, 1806.

22. As paraphrased in Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammed Qasim Zaman, eds., Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to bin Laden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 307.

23. It also forbids killing animals except for sustenance, cutting down fruit-bearing trees, and other restrictions. See Khaled Abou el Fadl, “Between Functionalism and Morality: The Juristic Debates on the Conduct of War,” in Islamic Ethics of Life: Abortion, War, and Euthanasia, ed. Jonathan Brockopp (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2003), 103–28.

24. John Kelsay, “Antisemitism in Classical Islamic Sources,” in Not Your Father’s Antisemitism: Hatred of the Jews in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Michael Berenbaum (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2008), 107–12.

25. See Shah-Kazemi, Spirit of Tolerance in Islam, 39, 123; C. E. Bosworth, “The Concept of Dhimma in Early Islam,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982): 1:37–51.

26. Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979), 157–58.

27. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 251, 201, 255–58. See the chronicles of Dionysius of Tel Mahré and Michael the Syrian, and the Charter of Privileges reportedly assigned by Muhammad to the community at St. Catherine’s monastery.

28. Braude and Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire.

29. Ronald Grigor Suny, They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), xi–xxi. Shah-Kazemi, Spirit of Tolerance, 66, cites a hadith in which Muhammad warns, “On the day of judgment I myself will act as accuser of any man who oppresses a person under the protection of Islam.”

30. Joshua Finkel, “A Risala of al-Jahiz,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 47 (1927): 316, 318–319, 328–33. Hava Lazarus-Yafeh argued that anti-Christian polemic multiplied after the Crusades: “Some Neglected Aspects of Medieval Muslim Polemic against Christianity,” Harvard Theological Review 89:1 (1996): 70, doi:10.1017/S0017816000031813.

31. Lamptey [Rhodes], Never Wholly Other, 23. See Gabriel Said Reynolds, “On the Qu’ranic Accusation of Falsification (Taḥrif) and Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130:2 (2010): 189–202.

32. Ibn Hazm, Al-fisal fi al-milal (Treatise on Religions, Sects and Creeds), I:35; cited in Moshe Gil, “The Creed of Abā ‘Āmir,” Israel Oriental Studies 12, ed. Joel Kraemer (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 45. See Ghulam Haider Aasi, Muslim Understanding of Other Religions: A Study of Ibn Ḥazm’s Kitāb Al-faṣl Fī Al-milal Wa Al-aḥwā’ Wa Al-niḥal (New Delhi: Adam Publishers, 2007); Theodore Pulcini, Exegesis as Polemical Discourse: Ibn Hazm on Jewish and Christian Scriptures (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 1–128.

33. Pulcini, Exegesis as Polemical Discourse, 133. See also Camilla Adang “Medieval Muslim Polemics and the Jewish Scriptures,” in Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey, ed. Jean Jacques Waardenburg (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 151–52.

34. Bernard Lewis, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 127.

35. Compare María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Back Bay Books, 2002); and Darío Fernández-Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews Under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2016).

36. Translation from Bernard Lewis, Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East (New York: Open Court, 2013), 159–61.

37. James T. Monroe, ed. and trans., Hispano-Arabic Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 332–36.

38. Similarly al-Amiri (d. 992). See Winter, “The Last Trump Card,” 135, 146; and “Realism and the Real,” in Between Heaven and Hell, ed. Khalil, 127. In Islam and the Fate of Others: The Salvation Question (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), however, Khalil offers a different reading of al-Ghazali, naming his perspective “optimistic inclusivism.”

39. Kevin Reinhart, “Failures of Practice or Failures of Faith: Are Non-Muslims Subject to the Sharia?,” in Between Heaven and Hell, ed. Khalil, 13–14, 19. In the same volume, see Mohammad Fadel, “No Salvation Outside Islam,” 40.

40. Cited in Winter, “Realism and the Real,” 125.

41. Ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Quran al-azim I:103; II:67. See Sachedina, “Qur’an and Other Religions,” 308n10; Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Qur’anic Christians: An Analysis of Classical and Modern Exegesis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 93–128.

42. See Sachedina, “Qur’an and Other Religions,” 302. Al-Tabari and Shi’a commentator al-Tabarsi rejected the idea that 2:62 is abrogated by 3:65; naskh applies only to commands and prohibitions, not reports and promises. See Shah-Kazemi, “Beyond Polemics and Pluralism,” 94.

43. Reza Shah-Kazemi, Justice and Remembrance: Introducing the Spirituality of Imam Ali (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 73–132, 219–34.

44. Bernard Lewis, Origins of Isma’ilism: A Study of the Historical Background of the Fatamid Caliphate (Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer and Sons, 1940), 94, 96.

45. Shah-Kazemi, The Spirit of Tolerance, 58; Ibn al-Arabi, The Ringstones of Wisdom (Fusus al-hikam), trans. Caner Dagli (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004), 105–17; William Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 123–24, citing Ibn Arabi’s al-Futuhat al-makkiyya II.116.7.

46. Ibn al-‘Arabī, The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, trans. Reynold Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911), XI.

47. Rumi, The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks (New York: HarperOne, 1995), 32.

48. Abu’l Fadl as cited in Shah-Kazemi, Spirit of Tolerance, 35–36.

49. Cited in Chittick, Imaginal Worlds, 125.

50. Sidney H. Griffith, “The Monk in the Emir’s Majlis: Reflections on a Popular Genre of Christian Literary Apologetics in Arabic in the Early Islamic Period,” in The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam, ed. Hava Lazarus-Yafeh (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), 42.

51. See Sarah Stroumsa, “Ibn al-Rawandi’s su adab al-mujadala: The Role of Bad Manners in Medieval Disputations,” in The Majlis, ed. Lazarus-Yafeh, 75.

52. Griffith, “The Monk,” 62; based on an eleventh-century biographical dictionary Jadhwat al-Muqtabis.

53. Kitab al-Milal wa ‘l-Nihal; my translation from French in Daniel Gimaret and Guy Monnot, trans., Livre des Religions et des Sectes (Leuven: Peeters/UNESCO, 1986), 114.

54. See Steven Wasserstrom, “Islamicate History of Religions?,” History of Religions 27:4 (1988): 405–11; Gimaret and Monnot, Livre des Religions, 160, 165.

55. Ahmad S. Dallal, Yoginder Sikand, and Abdul Rashid Moten, “Ummah,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, Oxford Islamic Studies Online, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t236/e0818.

56. Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 344–45.

57. Seyyed Hossain Nasr, Islam: Religion, History and Civilization (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 5.

58. Jacques Waardenburg, “World Religions as Seen in the Light of Islam,” in Islam: Past Influence and Present Challenge, ed. Alfred Welch and Pierre Cahia (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1979), 246–47. Tim Winter calls it “non-categoric supersession” (“The Last Trump Card,” 138, 152).

59. Narrated by Ibn Abbas, a Companion of the Prophet, and collected by Ahmad b. Hanbal; “The Most Beloved Religion: Primordial and Generous Faith,” December 31, 2015, http://islamicuniversality.com/tag/din-al-hanif. A parallel report is found in Sahih al-Bukhari, ed. and trans. Muhammad Muhsin Kahn (Chicago, 1976), I:34.

60. Shah-Kazemi, Spirit of Tolerance, 80. See discussion of humanity’s noble stature in Qur’an 17:70, 95:4.

61. Fatoohi, Abrogation in the Qur’an, 32–33; Tariq Ramadan, “Salvation—The Known and the Unknown,” in Between Heaven and Hell, ed. Khalil, x.

62. Asghar Ali Engineer, “Islam and Pluralism,” in The Myth of Religious Superiority, ed. Knitter, 214–16.

63. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Religion and Religions,” in The Religious Other: Toward a Muslim Theology of Other Religions in a Post-Prophetic Age, ed. Muḥammad Suhail ‘Umar (Lahore, Pakistan: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 2008), 59–81.

64. Mahmut Aydin, “A Muslim Pluralist: Jalaluddin Rumi,” in The Myth of Religious Superiority, ed. Knitter, 223–24, 232–36.

65. Shah-Kazemi, Spirit of Tolerance, 75–111. Also The Other in the Light of the One: The Universality of Qur’an and Interfaith Dialogue (Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 2006).

66. See Pim Valkenberg’s review of The Religious Other, ed. Umar, in Modern Theology 27:3 (2011): 549–51, doi:10.1111/j.1468–0025.2011.01702.x.

67. Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Shari’ah Law: An Introduction (London: Oneworld, 2008), 2–3.

68. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, “Shari’a and Islamic Family Law: Transition and Transformation,” in Islamic Family Law in a Changing World: A Global Resource Book (London: Zed Books, 2002).

69. There is also a distinct realm for secular law (siyasa). See Asifa Quraishi, “Taking Shari’a Seriously,” Constitutional Commentary 26:297 (2010): 299–305, https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/concomm/71.

70. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam (New York: Praeger, 1967), 96.

71. See Mahmoud Ayoub, The Qur’an and Its Interpreters, 2:294.

CHAPTER 11: ENDURING CHALLENGES

1. Abraham Isaac Kook, “The Moral Principles,” in The Essential Writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, ed. and trans. Ben Zion Bokser (Teaneck, NJ: Ben Yehuda Press, 2006), 138.

2. Kook, “Derech haTechiya,” available in English translation as “Rav Kook: The Road to Renewal,” trans. Ben Zion Bokser, Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 13:3 (1973): 141.

3. See, e.g., Todd Gitlin and Leil Leibowitz, “The Centrality of Jewish Chosenness,” Tablet, June 7, 2010, https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/35579/the-centrality-of-jewish-chosenness.

4. See Shai Held, “A Bolt from the Blue,” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, February 10, 2015, http://shma.com/2015/02/a-bolt-from-the-blue; Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob, 77.

5. See Abraham Joshua Heschel, “No Religion is an Island,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 21:2:1 (1966): 125–26; Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, “In the Spittin’ Image of God,” Huffington Post, December 20, 2010, modified May 25, 2011, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-fuchs-kreimer/appearance-on-whyys-this-_b_796398.html; and articles by Dalit Kaplan (“Let Us Hear”) and Rachel Kohl Finegold (“The Choosing People”) in Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, February 10, 2015.

6. Mordecai M. Kaplan, “The Condition of Jewish Belief: A Symposium,” Commentary Magazine 42:2 (1966): 108–10. For a feminist critique of chosenness, see Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 96–103.

7. The yeshivah directed by Rabbi Shapira, Od Yosef Chai, published the manuscript. It was initially endorsed by several leading rabbis, only some of whom withdrew their support after they actually read it. See Daniel Estrin, “The King’s Torah: A Rabbinic Text or a Call to Terror?,” Haaretz, January 22, 2010, https://www.haaretz.com/1.5088576.

8. See Gadi Gvaryahu, “Don’t Despair of Religious Zionism,” New Israel Fund, April 2, 2012, https://www.nif.org/blog/dont-despair-of-religious-zionism; “Charges Filed against Rabbi for Racist Incitement and Violence,” New Israel Fund, December 8, 2016, https://www.nif.org/stories/human-rights-democracy/charges-filed-rabbi-racist-incitement-violence.

9. Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, “Reconstructing Chosenness in Ecumenical Perspective,” Zeek, January 31, 2012, http://zeek.forward.com/articles/117482.

10. See Paul Mendes-Flohr, “In Pursuit of Normalcy: Zionism’s Ambivalence toward Israel’s Election,” in Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism, ed. William Hutchison and Harmut Lehmann (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 203–24. Cf. Eisen, Peace and Violence, 141–204; Ehud Luz, Wrestling with an Angel: Power, Morality and Jewish Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

11. Also Rabbis Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874), Judah Alkalai (1798–1878), Isaac Jacob Reines (1839–1915); see Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 211–34.

12. Siḥot be’et milchamah [Discussions in Time of War], ed. Y. Haikin, cited in Ravitzky, Messianism, 84.

13. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

14. Eisen, The Peace and Violence of Judaism, 189–90. Purity of arms (taharat haneshek) is invoked in training Israel Defense Force soldiers, including instructions to minimize force, prevent civilian casualties, resist dehumanizing the enemy, and challenge criminal orders. See Aryeh Klapper et al., “Halakhah and Morality in Modern Warfare,” Meorot 6:1 (2006) for differing analyses of its practical application.

15. Gitlin and Leibovitz, “Centrality of Jewish Chosenness.”

16. Also, the Nation of Islam’s publication of The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews deliberately distorts Jewish participation in the slave trade, promoting African American antisemitism. See Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: NYU Press, 1998).

17. As in the writings of Abu al-Ala Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb; see William Shepard, “Sayyid Qutb’s Doctrine of “Jāhiliyya,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35:4 (Nov. 2003): 521–45; Quintan Wiktorowicz, “A Genealogy of Radical Islam,” in Political Islam: A Critical Reader, ed. Frederic Volpi (London: Routledge, 2011), 274–75.

18. Marcia Hermansen, “How to Put the Genie Back in the Bottle? ‘Identity’ Islam and Muslim Youth Cultures in America,” in Progressive Muslims, ed. Safi, 309–10.

19. See the website, www.acommonword.com.

20. Jerusha Lamptey [Rhodes], “Embracing Relationality and Theological Tensions,” in Between Heaven and Hell, ed. Khalil, 234–52. Mahmud Shaltut, “The Qur’an and Fighting” in Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, ed. Rudolph Peters (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2005), 59–102, similarly advocates seeking a Qur’anic worldview rather than isolated verses.

21. Sachedina, “The Qur’an and Other Religions,” 297, 306.

22. Winter, “The Last Trump Card,” 135. A surprising range of thinkers accept the potential acceptability of other paths for “Peoples of the Book” as indicated in Qur’an (e.g., 2:62), even though they continue to privilege the truth claims of Islam; these include the Iranian mullah Sayyid Mahmud Taleqani, the Pakistani modernist intellectual Fazlur Rahman, the Egyptian Salafi Islamist reformer Rashid Rida, and the American philosopher Muhammad Legenhausen.

23. Pew Research Center, “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society,” Pew Forum, April 3, 2013. http://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2013/04/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf, 140.

24. Asef Bayat, ed., Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4.

25. Euben and Zaman, eds., Princeton Readings, 4. Some view the conceptual frame of Islamism as a Western Orientalist construct; see Hasan Hanafi, “Islamism: Whose Debate Is It?,” in Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam, eds. Richard Martin and Abbas Barzegar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 63–66.

26. Al-Banna, “Toward the Light,” in Princeton Readings, ed. Euben and Zaman, 58–61. He cited the aya that describes Muhammad’s followers as “the best community” (3:110), a common trope in Islamist discourse.

27. Qutb, “In the Shade of the Qur’an,” in Princeton Readings, ed. Euben and Zaman, 147.

28. Faraj, “The Neglected Duty,” in Princeton Readings, ed. Euben and Zaman, 323–24, 327–43. Faraj was executed in 1982 as a co-conspirator in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in Egypt.

29. Euben and Zaman, eds., Princeton Readings, 226. Qaradawi was among the prominent Islamists who condemned the September 11 attacks on the United States.

30. Euben and Zaman, eds., Princeton Readings, 307.

31. Michel Jobert, “L’Islam et sa modernité,” Revue du Tiers-Monde 92 (1982): 773–84, https://www.persee.fr/doc/tiers_0040–7356_1982_num_23_92_4171; cited in Nadia Yassine, Full Sails Ahead, trans. Farouk Bouasse (Iowa City: Justice and Spirituality Publishing, 2006), 168–69.

32. Khalil al-Anani, “The Myth of Excluding Moderate Islamists in the Arab World” (The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, March 2010): 2. He offered the Muslim Brotherhood as a test case, radicalized in some countries, elsewhere participating peacefully in elections, and sometimes presenting a relatively progressive democratic platform.

33. Mohsen Kadivar, “From Traditional Islam to Islam as an End in Itself,” Die Welt des Islams 51:3–4 (2011): 459–84, doi:10.1163/157006011X611632; Center for Human Rights in Iran, “15 Prominent Iranians Call for a Referendum on the Islamic Republic,” February 14, 2018, https://www.iranhumanrights.org/2018/02/15-prominent-iranians-call-for-a-referendum-on-the-islamic-republic.

34. Robert Hefner, “Islam, Southeast Asian,” in The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, ed. Robert Wuthnow (London: Routledge, 2013), 1:396. See also Rushd as-Safaa, “Islamic Reform Against Islamism,” Reformer (May 16, 2018) https://medium.com/reformermag/islamic-reform-against-islamism-c7ba1f7da9be.

35. Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 186, 12, 106. Tibi was born in Syria but moved to Germany at age eighteen.

36. See Zaher Kazmi, “Beyond Liberal Islam,” Aeon, December 21, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-it-time-to-look-beyond-the-idea-of-liberal-islam; Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage, 1997); Adis Duderija, “Critical-Progressive Muslim Thought: Reflections on its Political Ramifications,” Review of Faith and International Affairs 11:3 (2013): 69–79, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2328581.

37. Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16:2 (2001): 224–25; Todd H. Green, Presumed Guilty: Why We Shouldn’t Ask Muslims to Condemn Terrorism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018).

38. Jonathan Lyons, Islam through Western Eyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 195. In the now-classic essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asserted: “White men are saving brown women from brown men” is the animating collective fantasy of Western imperialism (in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 92).

39. Todd H. Green, The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 205–36.

40. “The Islamic Veil Across Europe,” BBC News, May 31, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13038095.

41. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). See also Juliane Hammer, “(Muslim) Women’s Bodies, Islamophobia and American Politics,” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 42:1 (2013): 29–36, doi:10.1558/bsor.v42i1.29; Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104:3 (2002): 783–90.

42. See Matti Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007); Deborah E. Lipstadt, Antisemitism Here and Now (New York: Schocken Books, 2019); Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002); William Nicholls, Christian Anti-Semitism: A History of Hate (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995); Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam (New York: Colombia University Press, 2008); Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Thomas S. Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

43. FBI Hate Crimes Statistics, 2018, https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2018/topic/tables/table-1.xls.

44. Laurie Goodstein, “Christian Leaders Denounce Trump’s Plan to Favor Christian Refugees,” New York Times, January 29, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/us/christian-leaders-denounce-trumps-plan-to-favor-christian-immigrants.html; Harry Bruinius, “Why Evangelicals are Trump’s Strongest Travel-Ban Supporters,” Christian Science Monitor, March 3, 2017, https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2017/0303/Why-Evangelicals-are-Trump-s-strongest-travel-ban-supporters; Ruth Graham, “Christian Leaders Nearly Unanimous in Opposing Trump’s Muslim Ban,” Slate, January 29, 2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/01/29/christian_leaders_oppose_trump_s_muslim_ban.html.

45. See the remarks of Revs. Jimmy Swaggart and Pat Robertson: “Bush vs. the Televangelists,” BeliefNet, http://www.beliefnet.com/News/2002/11/Bush-Vs-The-Televangelists.aspx; WND Staff, “Pat Robertson: No Muslim Judges,” WorldNetDaily, May 3, 2005, http://www.wnd.com/2005/05/30130. Christians are not the only advocates of this perspective; see Matthew Duss, Yasmine Taeb, Ken Gude, and Ken Sofer, “Fear, Inc. 2.0: The Islamophobia Network’s Efforts to Manufacture Hate in America,” Center for American Progress, 2015, https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/FearInc-report2.11.pdf.

46. Douglas Pratt, Christian Engagement with Islam: Ecumenical Journeys since 1910 (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

47. See Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (London: SCM, 1983), and Gavin D’Costa, Theology and Religious Pluralism: The Challenge of Other Religions (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1986). For critiques and reframings, see Knitter, Myth of Religious Superiority, especially Perry Schmidt-Leukel, “Exclusivism, Inclusivism and Pluralism: The Tripolar Typology—Clarified and Reaffirmed,” and Rita Gross, “Excuse Me, but What’s the Question? Isn’t Religious Diversity Normal?”

48. See Suchocki, Divinity and Diversity; Peter C. Hodgson, “The Spirit and Religious Pluralism,” in Knitter, Myth of Religious Superiority, 135–50; S. Mark Heim, Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995); John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New York: Macmillan, 1989); Coleman, Making a Way; Cynthia M. Campbell, A Multitude of Blessings: A Christian Approach to Religious Diversity (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006).

49. Diana L. Eck, “What Is Pluralism?,” Pluralism Project, Harvard University, 2006, http://pluralism.org/what-is-pluralism.

50. Vatican II, Nostra aetate, 1965, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html.

51. Caryn Riswold, “Teaching the College ‘Nones’: Christian Privilege and the Religion Professor,” Teaching Theology and Religion 18:2 (2015): 133–48, doi:10.1111/teth.12275; see also Kwok Pui-Lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Thought (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 186–208.

52. Mary C. Boys, Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian Self-Understanding (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), 8. See also Amy-Jill Levine, “Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made about Early Judaism,” in Levine and Brettler, Jewish Annotated New Testament, 501–4.

53. Letty R. Russell, Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 38.

54. Andrew Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 49. See also Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005).

55. Roger Williams (1603–83) recognized the perils in championing a Christian nation chosen by God to rule the earth; he stood up for the rights of indigenous populations and was banished as a heretic (Rosemary Radford Ruether, America, Amerikkka: Elect Nation and Imperial Violence [London: Equinox, 2007], 251).

56. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1885), 219.

57. Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004); Ambrose Mong, Guns and Gospel: Imperialism and Evangelism in China (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke and Co., 2017); Ruether, America, Amerikkka. Missions later played a role in dismantling colonial empires; see Brian Stanley, ed., Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).

58. Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

59. Albert J. Beveridge, Congressional Record 56:1 (1900): 704–12, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ajb72.htm.

60. Woodrow Wilson, “A Campaign Address in Jersey City, New Jersey,” May 25, 1912, in vol. 24, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 443. See also Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 65–145.

61. Cited in W. R. Ward, “Response,” in Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism, ed. William Hutchison and Hartmut Lehmann (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 51.

62. Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7, 17, 255, 257–58.

63. Conor Cruise O’Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 1999), 41–42.

64. Abraham Lincoln, “Address to the New Jersey Senate,” Abraham Lincoln Online, February 21, 1861, http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/trenton1.htm.

65. Michael Fullilove, Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America into the War and into the World (London: Penguin, 2013), 130.

66. Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” https://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15609.

67. Gitlin and Leibovitz, The Chosen Peoples, xvi.

CHAPTER 12: RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE?

1. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). In the 2005 expanded edition, he made additional room for religious speech (l–liv). Note similarity to rules of the majlis discussed in chap. 10.

2. Barack Obama, “Call to Renewal,” keynote address, June 28, 2006, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/us/politics/2006obamaspeech.html.

3. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 295.

4. Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 230.

5. Wilfred M. McClay, “Two Concepts of Secularism,” in Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, ed. Hugh Heclo and Wilfred McClay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 33.

6. Hervieu-Léger, “What Scripture Tells Me,” 27.

7. David Hollinger, “Religious Ideas: Should They Be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?,” Representations 101 (2008): 147, doi:10.1525/rep.2008.101.1.144.

8. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xviii.

9. See the Supreme Court opinions in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission; the First Amendment Defense Act introduced in the 115th Congress (S.2525, 2017–2018); and the recently established Health and Human Services Department’s Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, “Ensuring Compliance with Certain Statutory Provisions in Health Care; Delegations of Authority” (January 18, 2018). See also Rachel Mikva, “For Trump Administration, What Does Religious Freedom Really Mean?,” CNN Opinion, August 12, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/08/opinions/trump-religious-liberty-opinion-mikva.

10. Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 37.

11. See David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990), 252.

12. See, e.g., Dan Gilgoff, “6 Other Calamities Blamed on Divine Retribution,” CNN Belief Blog, March 16, 2011, http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/16/6-other-calamities-blamed-on-divine-retribution.

13. See the nuanced treatment of prosperity gospel in Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018).

14. Russell H. Conwell, Acres of Diamonds (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1915), 21.

15. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London: J. and R. Tonson, 1779), 55. Maimonides said an untutored soul observes mitzvot to avoid punishment, but we learn to serve God out of love (Mishnah Torah Hil. Tesh. 10.1–2).

16. Phillip Smith, Punishment and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5; Garland, Punishment and Modern Society, 186.

17. Statistics vary, but recent studies reveal a recidivism rate over 60%, more than 2.2 million people incarcerated, and 1 in 37 Americans caught “in the system” (“Trends in U.S. Corrections,” Sentencing Project, June 2019, https://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf; “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” NAACP, https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet, accessed December 19, 2019; Mariel Alper, Matthew R. Durose, and Joshua Markman, “2018 Update on Prisoner Recidivism: A 9-Year Follow-up Period (2005–2014),” Bureau of Justice Statistics, May 2018, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/18upr9yfup0514.pdf.

18. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 4.

19. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977).

20. See, e.g., T. Richard Snyder, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000); Herman Bianchi, Justice as Sanctuary: Toward a New System of Crime Control (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); James Logan, Good Punishment? Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

21. Conrad G. Brunk, “Restorative Justice and the Philosophical Theories of Criminal Punishment,” in The Spiritual Roots of Restorative Justice, ed. Michael L. Hadley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 31–56.

22. “Justice,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/justice.

23. Cf. Jacob Rosenberg and Avi Weiss, “Land Concentration, Efficiency, Slavery and the Jubilee,” in The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics, ed. Aaron Levine (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 74–88, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195398625.013.0003.

24. Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 33; Elliot Dorff, To Do the Right and the Good: A Jewish Approach to Modern Social Ethics (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002), 114–25.

25. Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 25.

26. See Eliezer Segal, “Jewish Perspectives on Restorative Justice,” in Hadley, The Spiritual Roots of Restorative Justice, 184.

27. See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah Hilchot De’ot 6.6–7, Nachmanides in his Torah commentary, op. cit.

28. Daniel Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998).

29. See m. Yoma 8 and y. Yoma 8:9 (45c), for discussion of atonement, the methods and importance of restoring right relationship. In b. Ber. 10a, Beruria chastised her husband, Rabbi Meir, for praying for the death of bandits rather than their repentance. See Aryeh Cohen, Justice in the City (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012).

30. This argument is not considered conclusive proof that eye for an eye means monetary compensation, but its obsessive focus on equal punishment highlights the difficulty of measuring retribution. David Daube argued that Tanakh intends compensation (Studies in Biblical Law [1946; repr., Clark NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2004]), 102–53. Cf. Matt. 5.

31. A striking, rather strange example is the list of sins and their consequent afflictions in b. Shabb. 32b–33a.

32. US Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice,” November 15, 2000, http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/criminal-justice-restorative-justice/crime-and-criminal-justice.cfm.

33. Christopher Marshall, Compassionate Justice (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012), loc. 943–949.

34. See Levine and Brettler, Jewish Annotated New Testament, 123.

35. See, e.g. Ezra 4, Neh. 4; Josephus, Antiquities 13.74–79, 18.19–20; Jewish War 2.232–37.

36. “Letters of St. Augustine” 133, composed in 412 CE, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102133.htm.

37. Thomas Hughson, “Social Justice in Lactantius’ Divine Institutes: An Exploration,” in Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics, ed. Johan Leemans, Brian Matz, and Johan Verstraeten (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 193. See Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100–1626 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 46–47.

38. See Gary Anderson, Charity: The Place of the Poor in Biblical Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

39. Timothy Patitsas, “St. Basil’s Philanthropic Program and Modern Microlending Strategies for Economic Self-Actualization,” in Wealth and Poverty in the Early Church and Society, ed. Susan Holman (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 270.

40. See Mohammed Hashim Kamali, Freedom, Equality and Justice in Islam (Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 2002), 133–42. (Note: It somewhat misrepresents Jewish and Christian teachings, but frames Muslim teachings of distributive justice.)

41. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 180. Hanafi jurist al-Kasani (twelfth century) and many others published lists of multiple circumstances that seed doubt and avert severe retribution.

42. Mutaz M. Qafisheh, “Restorative Justice in the Islamic Penal Law: A Contribution to the Global System,” International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences 7:1 (2012): 496–97, https://www.sascv.org/ijcjs/pdfs/mutazaicjs20121stissue.pdf.

43. Susan C. Hascall, “Restorative Justice in Islam: Should Qisas Be Considered a Form of Restorative Justice?,” Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law 35 (2011): 36.

44. Qafisheh, “Restorative Justice,” 488.

45. Yildirim, “Peace and Conflict Resolution in the Medina Charter,” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 18 (2006): 109–17.

46. See Abdul Aziz Said, Nathan C. Funk, and Ayse S. Kadayifci, eds., Peace and Conflict Resolution in Islam: Precept and Practice (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001).

47. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah Sanhedrin 22:4. See Dorff, To Do the Right and the Good, 120.

48. Conciliation processes were also prevalent in pre-Islamic Arabia; see Doron Pely, Muslim/Arab Mediation and Conflict Resolution: Understanding Sulha (London: Routledge, 2016), 16.

49. Qafisheh, “Restorative Justice,” 491.

50. Heather Thomson, “Justice and Gender: On Feminist Theology and Restorative Justice,” in The Bible, Justice, and Public Theology, ed. David J. Neville (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014), 143.

51. Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 187.

52. See Thomas Noakes-Duncan, “The Emergence of Restorative Justice in Ecclesial Practice,” in Journal of Moral Theology 5:2 (2016).

53. Marshall, Compassionate Justice, loc. 218.

54. Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses: Restorative Justice for Our Times (1990; repr., Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2015), 83.

55. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 309.

CHAPTER 13: THE SPACE-IN-BETWEEN

1. Dawkins, 1996 address accepting the American Humanist Association’s 1996 Humanist of the Year award, The Humanist (1997).

2. Hollinger, “Religious Ideas,” 145.

3. Originally, it restricted only congressional (i.e., national) action; states were allowed to have official religions and only gradually disestablished them. Since the Supreme Court adopted the doctrine of selective incorporation (early twentieth century), constitutional protections apply to the states as well. One consequence is that atheists may hold public office even in the seven states that still have laws on their books prohibiting them from doing so.

4. Cathleen Kaveny, Prophecy Without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), ix–x.

5. Diana L. Eck, “Prospects for Pluralism: Voice and Vision in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75:4 (2007): 771, doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfm061.

6. Peter Ochs, ed. The Return to Scripture in Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1993), 3.

7. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (orig., 1975; repr., London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 308.

8. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).