Dabru Emet, the important statement by Jewish scholars on the religious significance of Christianity and the Jewish relation to the Church, stimulated an articulate debate among Jews: Jon Levenson fears that the anodyne character of Dabru Emet lacks a conceptually coherent pluralism and commits Jews to positions which alter the fundamental character of Judaism. Does dialogical engagement with another tradition substantially modify the features of a religion? The Christian theologian Paul van Buren outlines three stages in the relationship of the two faiths which seem to lead to radical revision, certainly of Christianity. Van Buren's approach raises the question of the weighting accorded to different ‘moments’ in the dynamic of revelation springing from Israel. If Christianity is ‘reconfigured Judaism’, and the relation to Judaism is at the heart of Christian identity, then the two traditions exercise a conjoined, single mission on behalf of the truth of God. Israel according to the flesh and the community of reconfigured Israel are two communities, focused upon different but inseparable moments in ‘the design of the Lord of the covenant’, which might be designated as ‘the Israel of God’.

This paper explores the profiles of the women characters Sarah and Hagar as models of human identity. The two characters can only be explored through reading the over-arching narrative of the story of Abraham. Their profiles and narrated personalities have to be extracted from that narrative, but there is a two-sided nature of this necessity. If Sarah and Hagar cannot be separated from the biblical narrator's engagement with father Abraham, neither can Abraham function as father of the nations except through his interaction with these two women. The reader is thus led towards an understanding of how the stories of Genesis 12–24 deal with the issue of parenthood.

The body of the paper consists in a close reading of the biblical material following a method of reading which is rooted in the use of imagination as an exegetical tool – a style adopted by Paul in his allegorical approach to Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4. This approach opens into narrative criticism with a focus on characterisation and on the interactions of Sarah, Hagar and Abraham, caught up in a Domestic Comedy. The women's characters are explored through the themes of parenthood as other, the other woman and woman as other. A final section explores some of the points of narrative ethics to be extracted from the close textual readings of the paper, with reference to the writings of Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas. It is suggested that female as well as male characters may offer fruitful models for human identity.

A prolonged (yet telescoped) rendition of the chequered history of relations between Christianity and Islam, as each religious community operated out of different political contexts, illustrates diverse modes of interaction, from disputation to mutual illumination via a shared Hellenic philosophical tradition. A theological probe takes us to the heart of Christian teaching—the triune God—only to unveil remarkable affinities with Islamic developments regarding divine unity. The key to our entire exploration—intellectual humility—functions specially well here: recognizing the comparable logics of revelation, as well as acknowledging the power of these revelations to transform human beings into holy men and women, should motivate us to attempt to reconcile apparent contradictions between Abrahamic faiths in a manner similar to the way philosophical theologians of these traditions proceeded in the Middle Ages to reconcile their respective revelations with reason. A tactic axial to this analysis compares Qur'an with Jesus, rather than Qur'an and Bible, to show the fruitfulness of this more coherent approach. Support from both traditions for a pervasive attitude of intellectual humility shows how to open ways forward.

An initial analysis of the theological aspects of Christian-Muslim relations. After setting the historical scene, the following theological issues are briefly explored: consequences of two faiths worshipping God, prophethood of Muhammed, status of the Qur'an, Jesus as “Son of God”, a Qur'anic Christology, “People of the Book” vs. “People of the Incarnate Revelation”, the divine/human relationship in heaven, salvation and original sin, free-will and predeterminism, unicity of God vs. Trinity, Unitarians as “true Christians”, death and resurrection vs. “undead ascension”, and has the magisterium of the Church distorted the true message of Jesus? Three dimensions of the issues are covered: Content: what are the theological issues? Method: how do we handle the issues? Consequences: what difference might that make for Christian theological reflection? The challenge is to develop a methodology that moves beyond polemic or apologetics, that recognises the limitations of understanding and that returns theological discourse to the realm of faith and accountability before God.

Islam contains a greater plurality of theology than is often realised. Here two “alternative voices” are chosen as examples of how cultural accretions can be questioned to what is taken to be the original, pure voice of Islam. Amina Wadud has led a mixed congregation in prayer in New York and has demonstrated, not without opposition, that women can be imams. There follows a discussion of the historical debate about women as imams and reactions to Wadud's actions. The second voice is Hasan Askari, an Indian Muslim who has written widely on inter-faith dialogue. He maintains that to reduce differences between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, differences should be interpreted symbolically rather than literally. He questions all claims to finality in any religion and he believes that historical Islam has yet to be transformed to “universal Islam”. Religious differences can only be finally transcended at a level of mystical experience.

In Summa Theologiae III.42.4 Aquinas asks whether or not Christ should have committed his teaching to writing, and in this article I offer an in-depth analysis of his answer. I begin with a point-by-point account of III.41.4, noting that Aquinas's concerns are with salvation-history rather than with questions of the practicalities of preaching and theologizing or with problems of hermeneutics. Drawing on other parts of the Summa, I then examine the three principal reasons why, according to Aquinas, Jesus should not have committed his teaching to writing – his excellence as a teacher, the excellence of his teaching, and the requirement that his teaching should be disseminated in an orderly manner. Observing that for Aquinas ‘Christ's action is our instruction’, I show how his actio operates as both mystery and teaching to implant the New Law within human hearts. Jeremiah 31:31–33 and Hebrews 8:8,10 are key texts for Aquinas, who believes that the promise that the New Law would be written on hearts could never have been fulfilled had Christ committed his teaching to writing.