Willem A. Bijlefeld Lecture
Jesus and Muhammad: New Convergences
By Timothy J. Winter
Tuesday, September 11
Listen to the Podcast of this lecture (52 min. 49mb mp3 file - this may take a while to load)
Listen to Dr. Winter's Q&A with the audience (16 min. 15mg mp3 file)
How should the divine disclose Itself? Iris Murdoch insists that “literature is the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture,” and modernity in general has often prioritized reading over seeing or hearing. “Semitic” ideas of revelation thus seem potentially modern: we read, rather than see, salvation, and Jewish and Muslim theologies have tried to make much of this convergence. Yet what room will remain for transcendence? The Ankara School of Theology insists that to be relevant to the world, the Qur’an must be “of the world,” and that classical notions of an uncreated scripture
obstruct a contemporary reading. Alternatives, however, remain attractive, especially when feminist readings of “God in the Reading” turn out to favor orthodoxy.
Timothy J. Winter is University Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, England, and a fellow of Wolfson College.
He has recently edited, with Bishop Richard Harries and Rabbi Norman Solomon, Abraham's Children: Jews, Christians and Muslims in Conversation (2006), and is the editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Islamic
Theology.
