1. Introduction
The diversity of religions is not a novelty; each of the three faiths had to start in a world that already had various other claims to the divine truth. The term "Abrahamic traditions" is itself a modern comparative term that would be applicable to indicating a shared genealogical and scriptural understanding of the figure of Abraham, but not a category that any of the three traditions used of itself in the classical understanding of their own traditions. It is used here as a heuristic device for indicating that these traditions share a scriptural and genealogical focus on Abraham, but not for suggesting a deeper theological unity. In that heuristic context, the theological implications of religious pluralism are now pressing themselves with great urgency in a globalized world of interfaith encounters, migration, and religiously charged conflict, with the question of the relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam focused on the notion of revelation: that God has revealed something of Godself, and of the moral and existential order in which God desires to guide humanity, in a way that goes beyond human unaided reason.
Most of the work on the subject is either an apologetics that looks at traditions in a comparative fashion, or an historical-of-the-religions phenomenology that rejects truth-claims entirely while focusing upon formal similarities. Neither leaves a gap that this article seeks to fill: given a reading of the account of revelation that takes each tradition seriously as a statement of truth, a statement from a professed faith, and yet is willing to put itself at risk through sustained engagement with the primary sources of the other traditions. This is what comparative theology, a method, is meant to fill.
The article continues with seven other steps. In Section 2, the theoretical and methodological approach is presented, which is different from the theology-of-religions stances of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism; key analytical concepts are clarified, and the confessional perspective from which this comparative study is conducted is explained. The concept and structure of revelation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam are explored in turn, starting with their respective primary texts and followed by classical and modern elaborations, with each section concluding with a brief note on the internal diversity and the limitations it imposes on this article. In this comparative analysis, which considers the two sides of an analogy equally important, Section 6 explicitly examines the restriction of the locus-transmission-authority paradigm of structuring the comparison. Section 7 returns to the author's theological commitments within the Sunni Islamic tradition, while Section 8 draws implications for interreligious dialogue in the Bangladeshi context rather than asserting them, and a concluding section summarises the argument.
2. Comparative Theology as Method, not a Fourth Theology-of-Religions Paradigm
Modern Christian theology of religions traditionally recognises three broad attitudes toward religious diversity: exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, the latter of which is identified mainly with Hick1, who sees different world religions as culturally conditioned but essentially similar responses to a common transcendent Real. These are substantive positions in theology, making an assertion about where salvation and true revelation really is.
This article is not about a fourth position in this series, because comparative theology, as developed by Clooney2, is not a fourth position. In principle, comparative theology is a method, a disciplined practice which involves "passing over" (entering) the primary documents of other traditions and "returning" (coming back) to one's own tradition with a new or unsettled understanding. Comparative theology is not a theology that brackets truth-claims; comparative theology is not apologetics, but is theological comparison. In practice, however, the method itself gradually tends to develop a characteristic alignment of its adherents over time: sustained and serious reading of another tradition's sources from the perspective of that tradition itself is not easy to maintain when one approaches the tradition with an attitude of flat exclusivist dismissal. The attitude presented in this article, therefore, is best defined as confessionally inspired Sunni comparative theology with a dialogical, broadly inclusivist attitude; the Islamic revelation is accepted as the norm and final one for the author, while the Jewish and Christian's revelation is recognized as valid but different, in keeping with the Qur'an's own admission of the previous revelation (Qur'an 5:48).
For clarity, two analytical terms are repeated and explained below. Each tradition provides an answer, for each tradition, to the question, "In what kind of thing does the revelation most properly and finally consist – in an event and the event's transmitted memory, in a person, in a text? – an ontological locus. “Phenomenological structure” is not a doctrine that any tradition teaches, but rather a second-order description, a comparativist description, of formal features (address, disclosure, relationship) that can be found in the traditions' accounts of revelation, in various forms and relative weights. Section 6 challenges this as being a structure that needs to be understood as such, not as a sign of an underlying doctrinal unity.
However, this hope of comparative theology is not taken for granted. Comparative theology, if applied unsuspectingly, may become a form of de facto pluralism, of a kind that the method rejects; that is to say, of treating all traditions as equally valid data sets for a neutral comparativist.3 The one that Cornille proposes and the one that is followed here are that the comparativist is subject to the standards of coherence and truth of a home tradition that he or she is in the process of transforming, yet the process of comparison is not a view from nowhere but a disciplined act from somewhere. It is thus fitting to say straightaway that this article is a non-neutral, careful, and sympathetic engagement with Jewish and Christian sources of knowledge, and that the reading of the Islamic sources in Sections 3 and 4 is an outsider's attempt, likewise in the spirit of the invitation of Jewish and Christian readers to read Muslim sources critically in Section 5.
3. Divine Revelation in Judaism
3.1 Primary Textual Witness
The Hebrew Bible does not offer revelation as a discrete document, but as an aspect of covenant history, with theophany, law, and covenant intertwined rather than distinct moments. In the narrative of Sinai (Exodus 19-20), the people gather to see theophany: thunder, cloud, fire, and trumpet, and hear God speak, and then Moses receives the fuller law; receiving the law is the act of the covenant, the giving of the law is the act of the covenant. Finally, one of the most surprising aspects of Deuteronomy is how it ends by announcing the lack of a future prophet with whom the LORD will engage "face to face" as He did with Moses (Deuteronomy 34:10), with a parallel statement that God would raise a prophet "like Moses" for Israel (Deuteronomy 18:15), a dichotomy that was resolved differently by subsequent Jewish and Christian interpreters. Mishnah Avot 1:1 further develops this event-based view into the rabbinic era, in which revelation's authority is not just in the original event but in a continuous chain of transmission and interpretation that is guaranteed by the community at large: Moses received Torah at Sinai, then Joshua received it from Moses, Joshua received from the elders, the elders received from the prophets, and the prophets received from Joshua the men of the Great Assembly. This is a distinctly rabbinic construal, and it should be so labeled: it is the reading of the restriction of the authority by Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism itself, not a reading of religion as it existed in biblical Israel.
3.2 Doctrinal and Philosophical Elaboration.
Rabbinic Judaism took this covenantal concept a step further by separating Written Torah from Oral Torah, understanding that the fullness of revelation has also been given to the sages in the form of interpretive tradition and now recorded in the Mishnah and Talmud. In this construal, the Oral has been revealed with the Written at Sinai, so that revelation does not happen in one moment but rather unfolds over a span of generations in the process of halakhic reasoning.4 This claim must be handled with care because the connection between the content of the material and its rabbinic expression is never definitive; and the rabbinic expression is not merely the production of new revelation, but the responsibility for its authoritative extension and application. The latter is one of the distinctions that the rabbinic sources themselves try to preserve, though not always effectively.
This was complicated and enriched further by modern Jewish thought. These existentialist theologians (including Buber5 and Rosenzweig6) redefined revelation as an I-Thou moment, an encounter of address that brings the human person into a relationship and responsibility, and the commandments were understood as the community's expression of that moment. Heschel7 also stressed revelation as an act of divine pathos and human response, not dictation, and sees prophecy as a way of being sympathetic with the divine concern for the world. One of the most significant, if theologically less popular, streams of the Jewish philosophical tradition in this area is Spinoza's rationalist critique of prophecy (revelation mediated, primarily, through the vivid imagination of the prophet, as opposed to a uniquely perfected intellect); only recently was this read in comparison to Catholic and Islamic accounts of revelation by Widigdo and Zakaria8.
3.3 Internal Diversity and the Limits of this Account
The account above is the one that comes from the sources of Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism and its Orthodox and Conservative descendants, and this range must necessarily be told and not taken for granted. Historically, Karaite Judaism has been based on the assumption that no Oral Torah or chain of rabbinic interpretation exists and that the Written Torah alone is revealed and normative, whereas Reform Judaism has historically interpreted the verbal inspiration even of the Written Torah as relative and history as the process of the evolving revelation of ethics. Judaism" and "Rabbinic Judaism" are therefore not synonymous, and this is an article about Judaism that refers to the majority school, which is not an agreement, but rather a common academic practice that is not meant to resolve these schisms. A more comprehensive comparative analysis would have to examine the cases of Karaite and Reform accounts of revelation as separate case studies, rather than as variations on a rabbinic norm.
4. Divine Revelation in Christianity
4.1 Primary Textual Witness
Classical and creedal Christian theology places the whole of revelation in a person, rather than a text. For the Fourth Gospel, the deliberate use of the word sarx for embodiment rather than a more sophisticated philosophical word emphasizes that revelation does not end in an abstract revelation of divine ideas, but in a concrete, vulnerable human life, a fact later developed by the Christology of the patristics and conciliars into the doctrine of the incarnation. The opening of the Letter to the Hebrews makes the same structural point in explicit comparative terms: God, the Letter says, spoke to the ancestors "at many times and in various ways" through the prophets, but "in these last days" has spoken through a Son (Hebrews 1:1–2): language which makes it clear that the prophets' words were not mere human insight, but were really divine speech; and that this latest word was not the end of the prophets' word, but rather fulfilled the prophets' word with a new, climactic voice (Hebrews 1:1–2, comparing "in these last days" with the prophets' word, and "at many times and in various ways," with the Torah and the Gospel). With this Christocentric focus, the Pastoral Epistles also contain a text that is frequently quoted to support a more propositional and text-based understanding of revelation: 2 Timothy 3:16, "all Scripture is God-breathed (theopneustos) and useful for teaching. The original referent of this verse was almost certainly the Jewish scriptures that the early church had inherited and not a later form of the New Testament canon, and this verse is in evident, productive tension with the Christocentric emphasis of the Gospel of John and the Epistle to the Hebrews.
4.2 Doctrinal and Philosophical Elaboration
In this tension, Dulles9, working from an especially Catholic theological perspective, sought to systemize the various models of revelation that are found in the biblical text as follows: revelation as doctrine (propositional truth, closest to 2 Timothy 3:16 as received), revelation as history (God's mighty acts), revelation as inner experience, revelation as dialectical presence (God's Word breaking into human words without being identical with them, associated with Barth), and revelation as new awareness or consciousness-raising (associated with modernist and process theologies). But none of these models is self-sufficient, and this is the latest in the long history of scriptural traditions that have never quite been able to dispense with this tension - for Scripture can claim both an incarnate Word, in John, and God-breathed writings, in 2 Timothy, within the same canon. It is important to emphasize that Dulles' typology is not a neutral representation of Christian doctrine per se, but is a systematization which has been Catholic in its framing, and which, as discussed by Widigdo and Zakaria10, later theorists have tended to overlook in favor of preferring the textual model, which treats the text as the normative witness to revelation, instead of the personal model, which treats revelation as the ultimate source.
It is in this Christocentric structure that a distinctive narrative of transmission and authority emerges, but the balance it achieves is quite different across communion.11 But generally, Catholic and Orthodox theology is that Scripture, apostolic tradition, and an ecclesial teaching office (as different as the two are) are interchangeably authoritative, whereas a Protestant theology, for example, has historically tended toward a primacy for Scripture, which is the norm by which tradition and church teaching are to be evaluated (sola scriptura) – closer in spirit to Dulles' model of theology. The claim ‘faith as the condition of revelation's actualization' is a claim that needs unpacking, not assertion in its entirety, and is not the same as the claim that revelation is objectively given whether or not it is received in faith; the salvific efficacy of the revelation for the individual hearer is what depends on the faith, and this is a claim that this article does not intend to collapse into the other.
4.3 Internal diversity and limits of this account
The above is drawn primarily from the creedal tradition of Catholic, Orthodox and mainstream Protestant theology as synthesised by Dulles12 and McGrath13 and the key canonical texts that have been central to this tradition. It does not adequately reflect liberal Protestant views that seek to relativise the uniqueness of the incarnation, Pentecostal and charismatic views that emphasise continuing prophetic revelation outside of scripture, or the diversity of Christian communions as to how scripture, tradition and the teaching office are related to each other. This is a limitation of scope and is not addressed here.
5. Revealed Knowledge in Islam
5.1 Primary Textual Witness
Islamic theology is a doctrine of revelation that is all too concentrated in the text, and the Qur'an is not like the other three traditions' scriptures in providing a first-order account of the way in which it is transmitted-the way in which it is transmitted is conceptually richer than the single English word revelation would indicate, however, in the case of Islam. Islamic sources differentiate between several similar but distinct terms: Wahi (revelatory communication in general), kalam Allah (the speech of God as such), tanzil and nuzul (the "sending down" of the Qur'an, with an emphasis on its descent from a transcendent source), ilqa' (a casting or inspiring), and ilham (inspiration in a broader, sometimes non-prophetic sense). In Surat al-Shura (The Consultation), God reveals three ways he communicates to humans: directly by inspiration (Wahian), through a veil, and through a messenger (rasul, understood as the angel Gabriel) who receives by God's permission what God has willed (Qur'an 42:51) — three different modes of communication linguistically and exegetically, with the third being specifically identified as the revelation of the Qur'an itself. Classical interpreters of the Qur'an have disagreed about the precise scope of Surat al-Najm's meaning, with many taking it to mean not so much his daily speech and conversation, as is usual in the Qur'an, but only his proclamation of the Qur'an and his religious teaching from the Qur'anic perspective; this distinction was later formalized in the traditional distinction between the Qur'an and the Prophetic Hadith, the latter regarded as a category of revealed guidance distinct from the Qur'an. God is the one who granted Gabriel permission to bring it [the Qur'ān] down to you, by God's permission, and he has revealed it on your heart, and it confirms what previous to it of divine scripture; and it is a criterion by which to judge between right and wrong; this is the way it was described by the Qur'ān itself in Surat al-Baqarah, when Gabriel is expressly named as the bearer of the Qur'ān by God's permission, and in Surat al-Ma'idah, where the Qur'ān is described as confirming what was before it of the divine scripture and as a criterion by which to judge between right and wrong". It is also important to remember, in the context of a purely textualist reading, that the name of the Qur'ān ("the Recitation") and its central role in Islamic liturgical practice suggests an oral, performative, and embodied nature of revelation that a description of it as a "dictated book" understates.
5.2 Doctrinal and Philosophical Elaboration
The doctrine of the Qur'an as the uncreated and literal words of God (kalam Allah) that are communicated without a human author's mediation evolved over a long, and disputed, history and not all at once, from this self-description. The state imposed the Mu'tazilite view that the Qur'an was made (makhluq), for both theological and institutional and political reasons, which are the subject of continued debate, during the ninth century, under the caliph al-Ma'mun and his immediate successors; although the traditionalist camp was not doctrinally united on every aspect of the theological method, it was united in opposing the state during this period, most notably Ahmad ibn Hanbal. The superior position of the traditionalists on the uncreated nature of the Qur'an was confirmed by the Ash'arite theological synthesis, which gradually and regionally spread throughout the Sunni world from the tenth to eleventh century and beyond, and which established the uncreatedness of the Qur'an as a theological position but provided it with a more sophisticated philosophical foundation, distinguishing the eternal, uncreated "speech of the soul" (kalam nafsi) from its created, recited, and written expression.14 The distinction is functional, with later Christian attempts, discussed in Section 4, to reconcile an eternal Word and a historically conditioned text, and should not be interpreted as implying the underlying theologies are at all the same.
Such a dictation-based approach, however, is not the only stream of Islamic thinking that exists today. Muhammad Abduh, a leading modernist reformer, stated in his treatise Risalat al-Tawhid that Wahi is a mode of internal spiritual knowledge given to the souls of exceptional purity, that can be received directly or through the mediation of an angel, and that is explicitly substantiated as being rationally possible, beyond scriptural self-testimony and ecclesial-style authority.15 With the correct modesty, it is offered here: it is based on Abduh's own treatise and on the secondary reading in Widigdo and Zakaria16, and does not mean that his rationalist epistemology is continuous with or even is equivalent to the radically different terminology of Sufi 'irfan that can be found in the mystical tradition, although both reject dictation-based accounts of Wahi.
A single-sentence gloss is not broad enough to capture the internal controversy of the Qur'an with regard to the Torat Allah (Torah) and the Injil (Gospel), as they have been passed down. The difference between classical and modern Muslim scholars has been whether tahrif means that the text of the Bible has actually been changed (tahrif al-lafz) or, as well attested in the tradition, a distortion or misinterpretation of the meaning of a text that was (or is) essentially preserved (tahrif al-ma'na), in fact more easily reconcilable with the Qur'an's own claim that the Torah and the Gospel were, or are, a genuine revelation (Qur'an 5:48). Neither of these is the single "settled" Islamic position; they both continue to exist in the tradition, and any attempt to the contrary exaggerates the record.
5.3 Internal Diversity and the Limits of This Account
Neither does it apply to the metaphysical accounts of Wahi and prophetic knowledge by the Shia, Ibadi, and Sufi traditions, each of which construct their own unique terminology for the relationship between the eternal word of God and its historical transmission, and which are not included in the account above. This is a scope limitation, not an oversight, and is similar to those noted for Judaism and Christianity above: a full account of the variety within the Islamic tradition regarding revelation is beyond the scope of a single comparative article that would be responsible for covering three traditions.
6. Comparative Analysis: Analogy and Difference
The three traditions together allow several qualified comparative observations, both of the primary texts and of the doctrinal reception. Revelation is interpreted as the activity of a personal, transcendent God who invites humanity to Himself and reveals moral and existential truths about Him that are not discoverable through unaided human reason and therefore opens up or restores a relationship between God and a human community. It is important to say clearly what type of claim this is, because it is not a shared doctrine that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam teach in common, nor does the tradition have a common vocabulary for that relationship: Jewish traditions speak of berit (covenant); Christian traditions, of covenant fulfilled, and of a specific Christian vocabulary, of koinonia and of the adoption in Christ; Islamic traditions, of a set of related but non-identical traditions, such as the primordial covenant of Qur'an 7:172, or covenant or pledge, which is called ‘ahd, innate disposition to God, fitrah, and islam itself. It is not evidence that these three traditions are covertly "agreeing" by collapsing them into a single English word, "covenant", but rather a construction along phenomenological lines by the comparativist that is helpful for comparison.
Ontological locus. The traditions vary greatly in their answers to the question of where revelation will finally be found, and, as demonstrated in Sections 3-5, no one tradition was entirely free of internal disagreements on this point. In Rabbinic Judaism, revelation takes precedence as an event: the Sinai theophany of Exodus 19-20 and the covenantal relationship which it initiates is continued through the dual Written-and-Oral Torah traced in Mishnah Avot 1:1, although this is not the case in Judaism as it is practiced by the Karaites and Reformers. In classical Christian theology, the key to revelation is the person of revelation, Christ as the Word of John 1, and Scripture as normative witness; the propositional current signaled by 2 Timothy 3:16 is also there, which is why Dulles17 says no one model fits, and why Christian communions do not accord equal weight to Scripture, tradition, and teaching office. In the realm of revelation, which is for Sunni Islamic orthodoxy primarily a text (Qur'an as kalam Allah as described in its own self-referential verses 42:51; 53:3–4; 2:97), the Prophet is not an author, but rather a transmitting recipient, and even here, the relationship between the reality of revelation and its created, recited expression is subject to ongoing debate rather than consensus.
Mode of transmission. The concept of theophany, prophetic address, and a continuous stream of rabbinic revelation and reasoning are all stressed in Jewish literature, their boundary often permeable, but not acknowledged by Karaite Judaism. The obligation to believe the gospel message of 2 Timothy 3:16 is in some tension with the emphasis placed on the objective giving of the gospel and on the actualization of the salvific effect of the gospel (not the gift) in the believing community, as emphasized by the Christian accounts of incarnation and the Spirit-led proclamation and reception of the gospel. Minority currents within Sunni thought, admittedly with careful stipulation, as in Abduh's work18, do understand the reception of revelation as inner knowledge accessible to those who are spiritually and intellectually ready to receive it.
Interpretive authority. Judaism has given a significant amount of interpretative power to the living halakhic community and its sages, as suggested by the chain of transmission in Mishnah Avot 1:1, although Karaite Judaism has not accepted anything in the chain. In Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches, Christianity is a balance in different combinations of Scripture, tradition, and the teaching office of the Church.19 The role of the Qur'anic text as a source of authority, which for Sunni Muslims is rooted in the text itself, in Prophetic precedent, and in Qur'anic interpretation based on juristic reasoning, was, for a time, a theological matter rather than a settled consensus, as the mihna showed, and for reformist Muslims, like Abduh, the role of reason and its power of interpretation was not to be neglected, though it was not unconstrained, while for Shi'i, Ibadi, and Sufi Muslims, the distribution of this authority is different, and this article's Sunni focus does not delve into that matter further.
These limitations of the comparison must be clearly expressed, rather than accepted, as an acknowledgment. Above is a framework of three categories for the analysis of the phenomena of "community", "law", "prophecy" and "revelation", that is imposed by the comparativist to facilitate comparison across traditions, but is not a native category of each of the three traditions. In Judaism, the three-fold framework is Torah, halakhah, and nevu'ah; in Christianity, it is revelation, incarnation, and ecclesiology; in Islam, it is Wahi, Sunnah, and kalam. It is important to note that three axes are used to hold all three together and may be interpreted as a symmetry of internal structure that the traditions themselves do not support, and thus is an artifact of the comparison rather than a discovery about the traditions themselves.
7. A Confessional Return: Implications for Sunni Islamic Theology
In keeping with Clooney20, who insisted that comparative theology was possible only in a moment of return to one's own tradition, and with a more rigorous standard that such a return would identify what, concretely, has changed, this section identifies two specific changes that have taken place as a result of the preceding comparison.
The author's working assumption (like most modern Sunni textbooks) was to treat Wahi primarily through the dictation-focused terms of tanzil and the Ash'arite distinction between the kalam of the Qur'an and its created recitation, an account focused on the Qur'an as text. The misspoken equation of revelation with the word in Arabic, which this text-based equation seems to leave unchallenged, was accompanied by a tacitly overlooked form of Islamic resistance: the "thread" that starts with the Ash'arite kalam nafsi doctrine, continues through the account of Wahi as inner knowledge in Abduh's21 writings, and leads to the present struggle between propositional and personal models of revelation that Dulles22 outlines. This is not to say that Islamic and Jewish or Christian accounts of revelation are congruent, but that the latter appeared more visible and more theologically useable within the author's own tradition when read through the lens of the former.
Secondly, reflection on the Sinai covenant, and on the Johannine Logos, illuminates the non-negotiables and the doctrinal distinctives of the Sunni Islamic position, ones which do not necessarily emerge from reflection on Islamic sources: specifically, the emphasis in the classical exegetical reading on the Qur'an (53:3-4) that revelation is received, not authored by the Prophet; and the emphasis in the classical exegetical reading on the Qur'an's textual finality (Qur'an 5:48) that cannot be relativized within Sunni orthodoxy as can the comparative encounter with Christian incarnational theology or Jewish covenantal existentialism. Comparative theology, as Cornille23 cautions against doing with disguised relativism, requires a naming of this boundary itself – returning is to bring back not only what has been won, but also what is left, which, on the criteria of Sunnī theology, is non-negotiable.
8. Towards Interreligious Dialogue: A Proposal for Bangladesh
Based on the preceding analysis, none of the three paradigms adequately describes the relationship between the accounts of revelation of the three traditions, and a confessionally oriented comparative theology, aware of qualified analogy and irreducible difference, appears to have a better claim than either of them on the name of scholarship. The translation of this into a concrete proposal for a particular national context needs to be done with care, and that wasn't particularly done in the earlier draft of the article. Beyond these general and well-documented facts, there is no Bangladesh-specific empirical evidence in this article to substantiate the extent to which the various communities and institutions of Bangladesh are now engaged in theological understandings of one another, and so the earlier, stronger sociological claim is withdrawn. All that can responsibly be said is that the distinction made in this paper between the structural or analogical comparison and doctrinal identity provides a framework that future empirical study of interfaith relations in Bangladesh could test and apply, and that one can find analogical dynamics that, as suggested by the comparison in this paper, are worth comparing with the dynamics in the interfaith relations found in the Muslim-majority contexts of Indonesia and Malaysia,24 but without assuming, in advance, that the dynamics in Bangladesh's interfaith relations are similar to those in Indonesia or Malaysia. This, however, is not an article of report but one of proposal to consider the possibility of Bangladesh as a viable and promising field of future empirical research and study on the theological account of revelation presented here in relation to its interaction with actual interreligious relations, curricula in madarasas and general schools as well as civic dialogue initiatives.
9. Conclusion
In this article, it was suggested, both based on the scriptural text and its classical and modern reception, that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam provide partially comparable but not identical accounts of divine revelation. It is most illuminating to compare their respective modes of revelation in light of the categories of the traditions themselves: covenantal Torah and its transmission by rabbi, the incarnated Word testified to by a Scripture whose internal testimony maintains an unresolved tension between personalist and propositional emphases, Qur'anic kalam received as prophetic Wahi and defended against either verbatim dictation or unconstrained inner illumination from within the tradition. Such a method is comparative theology and can detect genuine similarities and analogies, without denying or minimizing differences in doctrine that make each tradition a distinct entity, especially when it is explicitly brought to light from within each tradition and when it is honestly expressed from the perspective of this article as a Sunni perspective, and therefore with its own scope limitations.
Comparative study of prophetology in the scriptures of the three traditions can be extended in three more directions, namely, a closer study of a verse-by-verse comparison of prophetology in the scriptures of the three traditions, preferably in dialogue with classic interpreters of the scriptures from each tradition, not only through translation but also through dialogue; a comparative study of the impact of the theological study of prophetology on religious laws and ethics in the three traditions; and an empirical study of how the theological study of prophetology influences the lived religious relations in a particular national context such as Bangladesh. A theologically robust, textually informed, and self-limiting comparison of revelation-a comparison that explicitly compares and explicitly does not-that avoids the extremes of dismissive polemics and premature assertions of underlying sameness is a more enduring road for scholarship and for interfaith relations as well than either of the other options.
Endnotes
1. Hick, J. (1989). An interpretation of religion: Human responses to the transcendent. Yale University Press.
2. Clooney, F. X. (2010). Comparative theology: Deep learning across religious borders. Wiley-Blackwell.
3. Cornille, C. (2020). Meaning and method in comparative theology. Wiley-Blackwell.
4. Urbach, E. E. (1975). The sages: Their concepts and beliefs (I. Abrahams, Trans.). Magnes Press.
5. Buber, M. (1970). I and thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner's Sons. (Original work published 1923)
6. Rosenzweig, F. (2005). The star of redemption (B. E. Galli, Trans.). University of Wisconsin Press. (Original work published 1921)
7. Heschel, A. J. (1955). God in search of man: A philosophy of Judaism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
8. Widigdo, M. S. A., & Zakaria, A. R. B. (2021). Revelation in the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traditions: A critical analysis of Muhammad Abduh's notion of revelation through the lens of Joseph Ratzinger and Benedict de Spinoza. Religions, 12(9), 718. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090718
9. Dulles, A. (1992). Models of revelation. Orbis Books.
10. Widigdo, M. S. A., & Zakaria, A. R. B. (2021). Revelation in the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traditions: A critical analysis of Muhammad Abduh's notion of revelation through the lens of Joseph Ratzinger and Benedict de Spinoza. Religions, 12(9), 718. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090718
11. McGrath, A. E. (2016). Christian theology: An introduction (6th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
12. Dulles, A. (1992). Models of revelation. Orbis Books.
13. McGrath, A. E. (2016). Christian theology: An introduction (6th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
14. Winter, T. (Ed.). (2008). The Cambridge companion to classical Islamic theology. Cambridge University Press.
15. Abduh, M. (1966). The theology of unity (I. Musa'ad & K. Cragg, Trans.). George Allen & Unwin. (Original work published 1897)
16. Widigdo, M. S. A., & Zakaria, A. R. B. (2021). Revelation in the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traditions: A critical analysis of Muhammad Abduh's notion of revelation through the lens of Joseph Ratzinger and Benedict de Spinoza. Religions, 12(9), 718. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090718
17. Dulles, A. (1992). Models of revelation. Orbis Books.
18. Abduh, M. (1966). The theology of unity (I. Musa'ad & K. Cragg, Trans.). George Allen & Unwin. (Original work published 1897)
19. McGrath, A. E. (2016). Christian theology: An introduction (6th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
20. Clooney, F. X. (2010). Comparative theology: Deep learning across religious borders. Wiley-Blackwell.
21. Abduh, M. (1966). The theology of unity (I. Musa'ad & K. Cragg, Trans.). George Allen & Unwin. (Original work published 1897)
22. Dulles, A. (1992). Models of revelation. Orbis Books.
23. Cornille, C. (2020). Meaning and method in comparative theology. Wiley-Blackwell.
24. Dharta, F. Y., Susanto, T., Anggara, R., Hariyanto, F., & Sianturi, H. R. P. (2025). MUI's fatwa on interfaith greetings and religious tolerance: Can Indonesia find a middle ground? Frontiers in Communication, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1537568; Idoko, P. E. (2024). The possibility of an inclusivist view of religions. Journal of Religion and Theology, 6(1), 81–86.