Muhammad Reconsidered : A Christian Perspective on Islamic Prophecy [Hardcover]

Muhammad Reconsideredrectifies the failures of scholarly attempts to understand Islam in the West and to take Islamic theology seriously.

Engaging Islam from deep within the Christian tradition by addressing the question of the prophethood of Muhammad, Anna Bonta Moreland calls for a retrieval of Thomistic thought on prophecy. Without either appropriating the prophet as an unwitting Christian or reducing both Christianity and Islam to a common denominator, Moreland studies Muhammad within a Christian theology of revelation. This lens leads to a more sophisticated understanding of Islam, one that honors the integrity of the Catholic tradition and argues for the possibility in principle of Muhammad as a religious prophet.

Moreland sets the stage for this inquiry through an intertextual reading of the key Vatican II documents on Islam and on Christian revelation. She then uses Aquinas's treatment of prophecy to address the case of whether Muhammad is a prophet in Christian terms.Muhammad Reconsideredexamines the work of several Christian theologians, including W. Montgomery Watt, Hans K?ng, Kenneth Cragg, David Kerr, and Jacques Jomier, O.P., and then draws upon the practice of analogical reasoning in the theology of religious pluralism to show that a term in one religionin this case prophecycan have purchase in another religious tradition.

A genuine understanding of religious traditions has become a theopolitical necessity in the West. While many secularists expected an inevitable decline of religious belief as Enlightenment modernity took hold around the globe, it seems that the exact opposite has occurred. As the authors ofGods Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politicwrote in 2009, Over the past four decades, religions influence on politics has reversed its decline and become more powerful on every continent and across every major world religion. These authors argue that despite the prel£”