Miroslav Volf wrote an article, “Allah and the Trinity,” that appeared in The Christian Century, March 8, 2011, pp. 20–24.

I thought it was well written and did a solid job of presenting the fundamentals of orthodox Trinitarian theology. What I found intriguing was the thought about what part of a dialogue this article represents and the parts that are silent.

It presents a Christian view of statements in the Qur’an about Christianity, saying, “We do not see our faith reflected accurately in those statements, so what the Qur’an condemns is not what we hold to be the Christian faith.”

What was missing from the article, and may appear in the book, is how Christianity deals with Islam and its take on Christology, which seems, to me, to be the nub, or at least the tip of the nub. If Islam denies that God can be incarnate, then what it claims about God and what Christianity claims about God cannot both be right. That’s why one can view Islam as a Christological heresy. I would find it interesting to hear an Islamic theologian treat Christology from an Islamic perspective.

The question of truth comes down to the choice between “A” and “Not A.” These two choices together comprise the whole range of possibilities. If “A” is true, then “Not A” cannot be true, and conversely. The contentions of Christianity and Islam regarding Christology are of this form.

I suppose one could push Christian theology a little and say that not only is the incarnation an action that the Triune God chose to carry out to reveal himself to his creation, but that such an expression is constitutive of his very nature. If one grants that, then the divide between Christianity and Islam takes another step deeper. As I think this through, it strikes me that this may be the reason why the “Mohammedans” are condemned in the Augsburg Confession, Art. I, as ones who hold that “there is only one person” [in God].

The hopeful point about the condemnation is that one does not condemn as a heretic one who holds a belief in another god altogether. For example, we would not condemn Druids as heretics, but merely note they are pagans and therefore objects of the first fundamental round of witness to the faith in the Triune God. In contrast, at some level, those who pray to Allah and to the LORD are praying to the same God, so the conversation goes differently in this case.