MUSLIMS, CHRISTIANS AND LAW - Anjum Ralston

ISLAMOCHRISTIANA 48 (2023) 1-36
Ovamir ANJUM, Jonathan CHAPLIN, Joshua RALSTON*
MUSLIMS, CHRISTIANS AND LAW:

A SYMPOSIUM ON JOSHUA RALSTON’S
LAW AND THE RULE OF GOD: A CHRISTIAN ENGAGEMENT WITH SHARĪʿA
Joshua Ralston’s 2020 publication Law and the Rule of God: A Christian Engagement
with Sharīʿa is a significant contribution to scholarly Christian-Muslim dialogue on a topic
hitherto relatively little explored. To draw attention to this volume and to promote further di-
alogue on this topic, Islamochristiana is glad to print here two substantial reviews by Ovamir
Anjum and Jonathan Chaplin, followed by a response from the author.
REVIEW BY OVAMIR ANJUM
Joshua Ralston’s Law and the Rule of God is a courageous and erudite interven-
tion in the field of Christian-Muslim scholarly dialog, one that offers valuable provo-
cations to both sides. In an expansive and fraught field in which it takes a great deal
of learning and contemplation to say something valuable to either tradition, to man-
age to meaningfully challenge both, then, is that much rarer. The book centers its con-
cern in an unprecedented manner on divine law, an idiom that appears immediately at
home in Islam and Judaism but not so in Christianity. Ralston contends that leading
* Ovamir Anjum is the Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department
of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Toledo, Ohio, USA. He is the author
of Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2012), serves as the editor-in-chief at the Yaqeen Institute, and has founded the
Ummatics Institute.
Jonathan Chaplin is Fellow of Wesley House, Cambridge, where he contributes to the work
of the Centre for Faith in Public Life. He is Senior Fellow of the Canadian Christian think-tank
Cardus, contributing regularly to its journal Comment. His books include Herman Dooyeweerd:
Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame IN
2011) and Faith in Democracy: Framing a Politics of Deep Diversity (SCM, London 2021). He has
participated in the Building Bridges Seminar for Christian and Muslim scholars, contributing to
two books emerging from it, and has authored two articles on Christian and Islamic political thought.
Joshua Ralston is Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations at the School of Divinity, University
of Edinburgh and co-founder and director of the Christian-Muslim Studies Network.
2 Ovamir ANJUM, Jonathan CHAPLIN, Joshua RALSTON
exponents of Christianity across history have not satisfactorily wrestled with the ques-
tion of law and labors to show why this is a lacuna, and one that can be filled using
resources within Christianity, and a genuine dialog with the Islamic tradition can serve
as a source of inspiration. In a confessional yet bold and critical re-reading of
Christian tradition, he calls for a politically and socially involved Christianity that is
centered, as he insists, on the “event of Jesus” – the birth, crucifixion, and resurrec-
tion of Christ. Legal and kerygmatic aspects of sacred scriptures tend to be ignored in
interfaith scholarship because they are seen as particularistic, but Ralston insists that
appeals to one’s faith in revelation “need not entail an inherent fundamentalism or
foreclosure of mutual exchange in the interconnected and diverse societies of
the twenty-first century” (p. 46). This last consideration, our situatedness in modern
pluralistic societies, with its limitations and possibilities, informs, and perhaps even
constrains, the author’s thinking throughout. Ralston’s own contribution takes
Karl Barth as its point of departure, highlighting Barth’s concern that the founders of
Protestantism had failed to relate the justice of earth to the justice of heaven (p. 227).
But even as he builds on the Swiss theologian’s ideas, Ralston is cautious to preface
the engagement with an extensive critique of Barth’s uninformed views on Islam.
The first chapter, entitled “Christian Political Theology as Comparative Theol-
ogy”, highlights modern Western anxieties about Islam and Muslims, in particular,
“Muslims’ perceived inability to integrate into the West, adopt liberal democracy, or
protect minority rights commonly,” which is attributed in broad swathes of Western
commentary “to Islam’s insistence on merging the spiritual and political” (p. 21). From
John Locke and Hugo Grotius to Reinhold Niebuhr to more recent Christian theolo-
gians, theories of toleration and universalism have kept Muslims outside the realm of
tolerance. The outrage in Britain against a cautious call by an exceptional, learned
Christian scholar, Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, to countenance
British Muslims’ recourse to sharīʿa under English and Welsh law, serves to demon-
strate the point. Contemporary secular and Christian liberals have similarly found an
enemy in Muslims who “refuse to distinguish between religion and politics” (p. 9).
Against this history of exclusion and polemics, what Ralston calls for is not “essen-
tializing apologetics of sharīʿa” but rather “an approach that engages in honest, nu-
anced, and critical ways with the diverse debates and visions that Muslims and the
Islamic legal-theological traditions themselves have and are having on sharīʿa,
sovereignty, justice, and the rule of God” (p. 10).
This call for nuance is not new, if rarely taken up, among Western scholars, but
Ralston asks for more: for Christians to understand and rethink problems in Chris-
tianity and perhaps the very nature of secularism in conversation with Islamic tradi-
tion. He attempts to demonstrate that it is possible to undertake a “genuinely
theo-political engagement with Islam that does not move too quickly into the En-
lightenment dualities of public/private and religion/politics but engages with the com-
plexity of Islamic theology, ethics, and law” (p. 11). In his most welcome approach to
the West and Christianity, he takes the “problem” of Islam as a “profoundly theolog-
Muslims, Christians and Law 3
ical challenge to secularism and political liberalism, one that also directly impinges on
political theology and Christian-Muslim dialogue” (p. 15). Highlighting the insular-
ity of contemporary Christian political theology vis-à-vis non-Christian traditions,
Ralston finds inspiration in the work of Christian scholars such as David Burrell who
successfully juxtapose debates in Christianity with those in Islam and open the pos-
sibility of studying Islam for genuine mutual learning rather than as merely an object
(as the old-fashioned Orientalists were wont to do) or a security problem. He brings
this approach to bear on a field seldom broached, “a comparative political theology of
law.” Post-Christendom Christian political theology either remains beholden to the
liberal vision of theologians like Hans Küng and Reinhold Niebuhr who erase the
uniqueness of Christian claims and “minimize the capacity of theology to stand over
and against modernity and the nation-state” (p. 40) or a radical vision of return to pre-
secular Christendom as in the case of John Milbank. Ralston hears echoes of Arab
secularists in the former and radical Muslim thinkers (like Sayyid Quṭb) in the latter.
Abjuring both extremes, as well as the natural law tradition that has had a more
central place in Catholicism, in approaching what he terms “comparative theo-legal”
discourse Ralston situates himself in what appears to be a progressive scripturalist
Christianity. This allows him to take Islam, a tradition in which the primacy of reve-
lation is at the heart of legal and even theological reflection, more seriously than the
many Christian students of Islam who tend to privilege Islam’s rationalist strands.
The rest of the chapters make a concerted effort to keep the promises and demon-
strate the claims made in the first. Chapter Two, entitled “Neither Conciliation nor
Confrontation”, elaborates on the author’s approach, critiquing both liberal Christians
philosophically sympathetic to Islam like Hans Küng, who nonetheless consider the
sharīʿa an impediment to creating a shared ethical ground, and radical anti-liberal the-
ologians like John Milbank, in whose thought any genuine need to understand the
complex Muslim debates around sharīʿa is vitiated by the sweeping claim that sharīʿa
could only be (at least partially) tolerated in the West if Muslims lived as subjects
within a revived Christendom rather than within the current conditions of secularity.
Chapter Three gives an account of Muslim legal critiques of Christianity over the
centuries. The most significant of these comes from the Damascene polymath Ibn
Taymiyya (d. 1328 CE). In the words of Thomas F. Michel, which Ralston cites with
approval, Ibn Taymiyya’s massive six-volume al-Jawāb al-ṣaḥīḥ li-man baddala dīn
al-Masīḥ (“The correct response to those who altered the teachings of Christ”) is the
most sophisticated of the numerous Muslim polemics throughout history, one “whose
length and scope has never been equaled in Muslim critiques of the Christian religion
and whose depth of insight into the issues that separate Christianity and Islam sets it
among the masterpieces of Muslim polemic against Christianity” (p. 105). For Ral-
ston’s purpose, it is also the most relevant as it inaugurates a tradition of a legal cri-
tique of Christianity and contends that “public injustice in Christian political life is
deeply related to its negligence and ambivalence about the place of law after Christ”
(p. 106). Ibn Taymiyya’s medieval Christian interlocutor had claimed that whereas
Moses’s law was (an embodiment of) divine justice, Jesus’s law was divine grace and
hence superior, to which the Muslim theologian responded by positing Islamic sharīʿa
as completion and perfection, for neither justice nor grace alone are sufficient.
Ibn Taymiyya turned the well-known Christian refrain against law on its head, for to
claim that the oppressed must turn the other cheek and forgive the oppressor is to
commit a “double injustice upon the mistreated person who has sought justice”
(p. 114). What Christianity ultimately lacks, and what Ibn Taymiyya claims Islam
provides, is a vision of divine law that can give moral guidance and public justice
for both kings and paupers.
Modern Muslim critics of Christianity take up but do not add much to these clas-
sical themes. Confronted with the rise of secular modernity brought to their lands by
Western colonialism abetted by Christianity, they blame Christianity for either being
responsible for secularism, carrying its seed within itself, or being too weak to com-
bat it. More radical thinkers such as Sayyid Quṭb excoriated the Muslim scholars
domesticated by the postcolonial authoritarian nation-state as having gone down the
path of Christian clericalism and its “hideous schizophrenia” in their dualism and im-
plicit secularism, accepting the limits placed by the colonizers or post-colonial secu-
lar autocrats on God’s truth, and offers instead an “Islamic liberation theology”. The
chapter closes with a restatement of what the author takes to be the three productive
challenges that Muslim theology poses to Christianity: the alteration (taḥrīf) of Jesus’s
true message; the rejection of divine law and privileging man-made ethics and law
instead, opening both to manipulation by the powerful; and the lack of a divinely in-
spired social and legal vision that “might offer positive accounts of justice” in re-
sponse to specific sociocultural realities (pp. 137-138). The subsequent Chapters Four,
Five, and Six present robust engagement with these challenges, one in which the au-
thor’s point of view remains firmly grounded in Christian notions of revelation and
“the event of Jesus” yet in a fashion that allows him to respond to Muslim critiques
and at times accept and indigenize them.
Chapter Four begins by acknowledging that New Testament accounts of law as
well as early Church practice “seem to justify the Muslim critiques” and that “if any
constructive account of public law in dialog with Islam is to be possible, there first
must be important reparative work done to Christian theological accounts of Mosaic
law” (p. 146). This leads to a critical and insightful survey of classical Christian en-
gagements with law, starting with Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (whose un-
charitable reading of Jewish law and philosophical penchant for natural law are faulted)
(p. 156) and Justinian’s Corpus of civil law (which, the author points out, is “ironi-
cally” drawn from “pre-Christian ‘pagan’” law rather than the Old Testament [p. 159]).
Thomas Aquinas’s sophisticated discussion of natural law is presented in detail but is
found unsatisfactory as it contains little that reflects “the gospel of Christ” (p. 182).
Martin Luther shows even less regard for law, old or new, and his theology accords no
soteriological role to moral conduct directed at improving the world (p. 191). Luther’s
stance on war against Muslims/Turks illustrates the point well: Christians should never
go to war qua Christians, but since Luther demands that Christians obey their rulers
and defend their neighbors, Ralston notes that Luther “merely begins the process of
transmuting holy war onto the princes and what will eventually become the state” with
the result that “[i]nstead of holy war being a salvific act justified by a priest, it is now
a moral obligation based on the divine authorization to obey rulers” (p. 192).
Chapter Five, entitled “Building a Christological Legal Foundation”, begins the
constructive endeavor inspired by Karl Barth’s call to ground public law in “the event
of Jesus”. Seeking to respond to Muslim critique of taḥrīf (alteration or corruption),
Ralston invokes the Qurʾānic concept of furqān (criterion) to make room for Chris-
tians’ selective acceptance of Mosaic law (p. 199). Muslims are urged to understand
why to abandon aspects of the old law in accordance with the furqān is not taḥrīf for
Christians, for it is no different from the Qurʾānic abrogation of earlier laws. It is pre-
cisely the nature of that furqān, we may observe, that remains the bone of contention
between the two traditions. To Muslim critiques of scriptural corruption and the ab-
sence of a Christian legal vision, Ralston responds that “[t]he problem is not a lack of
a fundamental Christian principle – for that is the event of Jesus and the proclamation
that the crucified one is Lord – but, rather, a lack of consistency in judging all aspects
of the law in light of Christ” (p. 202). It is not clear how such consistency could be
attained when Christians have often fundamentally disagreed about the nature and the
event of Christ, and when for many that event is limited to claims about his death to
the exclusion of his actual life and conduct. At the abstract level, the potential of the
Islamic legal tradition is suggested as a middle way between divine command theory
and natural law arguments. “Developing such theo-juridical reasoning and connecting
it more clearly with the demands and challenges of contemporary legal arguments re-
mains an outstanding task for Protestant political theologies that do not wish to return
to natural law as the central frame for public law” (p. 248). This proposal needs fur-
ther elaboration, for the sharīʿa legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) is grounded in a bounded
set of authoritative texts, whose divine authorship is the lynchpin of the entire system.
Without foregrounding a literal reading of an inerrant Bible, which the author does not
do, it is not clear how such texts are to be identified and canonized at a time when lead-
ing Christian theologians, not to mention biblical scholars, remain unsettled about
their scriptures’ provenance and authority.
Ralston wishes to build on Barth’s attempt to ground a political theology in the
gospel or Christology. But this compels him to wrestle with the latter’s consistent su-
persessionism and negative evaluations of the Jewish law, not to mention virulently
anti-Islamic polemics, and appears to pay meager dividends. Of the various analogies
through which Barth seeks to connect Christology and politics, some are found too
strained even by Ralston (p. 240). Ralston’s own proposal remains too abstract. Does
incarnation really affirm human dignity, or the dignity of Christians only, or something
different altogether? Can belief in Christ’s ministry with the poor shape one’s politics?
Can the event of Christ preclude the theory of the divine right of kings, the logic of
the crusades, or the divine curse upon Noah’s son Ham and his descendants of black-
ness or slavery? Concerning this last example, we have an instructive contrast with
Islamic cultures, where although such ideas circulated as biblical lore and influenced
social views, yet in the normative and legal tradition they could be rejected for lacking
authority or contradicting general scriptural principles and never enjoy legal status.1
Ralston indicates that no form of politics can be derived from this event, but it is not
clear if any guidance can be derived at all. Furthermore, the possibilities are slimmed
even further since the author eschews any radical politics and seeks to “ground claims
about public law in Christ without asking the state to be Christian or demanding that
others recognize Christian claims” (p. 211). It might have been helpful to explore
some concrete examples of how certain gaping inequities and the ravages of aggres-
sive secularism, colonialism, capitalism, and the military-industrial complex, not
to mention the rejection of biblical familial and sexual mores in formerly Christian
societies might be combatted under such constraints, which structures of authority
are more or less conducive to Christological witness, or even if any types of political
system are off limits.
Chapter Six, the penultimate chapter, also the most productive and challenging,
returns to the comparative and dialogical task. Its essential suggestion is that sharīʿa,
too, in line with Ralston’s vision of Christianity, must limit itself to social commen-
tary, occupying a similar middle ground between secular liberalism and medieval
theocracy. The thesis is formulated with the help of a story of sharīʿa’s transformation
across the rupture caused by modernity, relying on the work of selected Western legal
historians, an issue to which we return presently. The chapter also singles out certain
contemporary Muslim interlocutors for mutual challenge and enrichment such as the
Sudanese-American legal scholar Abdullahi An-Naʿim, Egyptian judge Muḥammad
Saʿīd al-ʿAshmāwī, Moroccan intellectual Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī, and Egyptian
American professor of law Khaled Abou El Fadl. Apart from the last of these, who has
some following among progressive American Muslims, none of these are taken as, or
even claim to be, authorities in and representatives of sharīʿa. An-Naʿim argues for a
secular state for Muslims and fundamentally rejects the historical form of the sharīʿa,
and, following his controversial teacher Maḥmūd Muḥammad Ṭāhā, eschews the
normative relevance of the Medinan half of the Qurʾān. Al-ʿAshmāwī was a secular-
ist and apologist for Mubarak’s authoritarian Egyptian state who battled Islamists as
well as the ʿulamāʾ of al-Azhar. Without agreeing with these interlocutors, Ralston
finds in them advocates of a post-sharīʿa order, based on the argument that divine
sovereignty could not be embodied in a state (pp. 300-302). None of the erudite Mus-
lims whose critique of Christianity Ralston finds fruitful for dialog in the earlier chap-
ters, such as Ismail Raji al-Faruqi and Sayyid Naquib al-Attas, reappear in this part of
the dialog. This, to me, is the Achille’s heel of this otherwise remarkably generous
1
See Jonathan A. C. Brown, Islam and Blackness, Oneworld, London 2022, 139-140;
appendix vi.
contribution, and one on which I will elaborate now. This critique, needless to say, is
not indicative of rejection and censure but solicitous of clarification, correction, and
continued dialog.
Ralston is cautious to recognize and eschew the implication that he is recom-
mending outright secularization: “I am not suggesting a Christian-style secularization
of Islam, or that Islam must reform akin to what is supposed to have transpired dur-
ing the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Western Europe, but a more humble and
cautious approach to invoking the divine name to justify particular political arrange-
ments” (p. 315). He further insists that the liberal demand that Christians and Muslims
give up the universal applicability of their belief and mission is unnecessary, and yet,
that “supporting a nonestablished religiously pluralist legal and political arena in no
way compromises Muslim and Christian commitments to the finality of their truth
claims and their relevance for every human person” (p. 266). It is worth asking, how-
ever, whether Muslims are tasked with just the same duty as he believes Christians are,
namely, to uphold the finality and relevance of their truth claims, and not also to up-
hold a divinely approved social and legal order. Of course, acknowledging that there
is no one blueprint for a social or political order in Islam, which most Muslim ʿulamāʾ
and Islamists readily do, is entirely different from holding that such an order need not
be authorized by sharīʿa. To accept this latter proposition for Muslims is secularism
to most sharīʿa-minded Muslims, while it may not be so for Christians.
Another question that could have been further explored is the nature of the sug-
gested “disestablishment”. Is it already a fact in Muslim history, or the contemporary
(post)colonial world? Or perhaps the model is the liberal West and Muslims are being
invited to emulate it? Is it, therefore, a project, an aspiration, and a process? If so, how
does it differ from secularism? Ralston does not explain this. Given his view that
sharīʿa as a political order is impossible in the modern world, perhaps we are to un-
derstand that disestablishment is the natural outcome. Invoking the historian of Is-
lamic law Wael Hallaq (a Palestinian-American of Christian heritage), he contends
that although sharīʿa was historically the law of the lands of Islam, it can no longer
be so as it is incompatible with the modern nation-state. Hallaq, incidentally, has also
argued forcefully that the modern state is an immoral and destructive institution, a
danger to the environment and humanity, and incompatible with sharīʿa, which is fun-
damentally ethical. It is the nation-state, therefore that must go (consider, for instance,
Wael Hallaq’s influential monograph The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and
Modernity’s Moral Predicament [Columbia University Press 2013], as well as more
recent works such as Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Phi-
losophy of Abdurrahman Taha, [Columbia University Press 2019]). Rather than fol-
low Hallaq’s radical point, the author seems to suggest the opposite. It is the secular
nation-state that must stay, or at least need not be radically altered, and it is sharīʿa that
must cease to exist in any historically recognizable form. In a scholarly dialog about
sharīʿa between Christians and Muslims it stands to reason that Muslims’ beliefs about
sharīʿa’s nature, purpose, and history should be at the center of attention. That Mus-
lim voices are seldom easily accessible on these questions is hardly Ralston’s fault, but
it is worth asking whether the rupture inflicted by modernity is indeed as radical and
stark, particularly in the eyes of Muslim scholars, as supposed by the historians he in-
vokes. More importantly, it is worth asking whether it is the case that nothing essen-
tial to Islam is compromised by the removal of sharīʿa from its theological and
historical role as the foundation of Muslim political authority.
Certain claims made by Ralston about sharīʿa, which also appear in recent West-
ern literature, need further nuance. To suggest that sharīʿa does not (and, in the clas-
sical period, did not) apply to non-Muslims is strictly speaking incorrect, for the
dhimma norms or any other arrangement whereby sharīʿa grants internal autonomy to
a community are still part of sharīʿa, and Muslims are bound to honor and judge such
contracts and norms as part of their duty to God. Similarly, the multivocality and con-
fessionally and communally sensitive nature of sharīʿa does not mean that it was not
also the enforced law in the lands of Islam. Statements like “State laws simply can-
not tolerate the type of diversity and plurality that is evidenced in sharīʿa, especially
when it is related to areas of so-called public concern” (p. 285) miss the crucial point
that Islamic legal pluralism was also limited by the notion of the interest of the Mus-
lim government, not to mention that of Islam and Muslims. Furthermore, historically,
in every Muslim region and every century since the rise of the fiqh (Islamic jurispru-
dence) schools around the third/ninth century, some school of fiqh, as one interpreta-
tion of sharīʿa, was enforced as public law over and above others, even when making
allowance for other legal schools and non-Muslim courts. Finally, to conclude that
sharīʿa cannot be imagined in modern states because of its diversity of interpretations
suffers from the fallacy of concluding from a potential theoretical tension within a
system its impossibility in practice; such reasoning renders a republican democracy
equally unthinkable. That the modern nation-state is an unchanging monolith or the
desired end of history are both implausible and ahistorical ideas, which Ralston does
not endorse, but could have explicitly challenged. Finally, suppose that we moderate
Wael Hallaq’s pessimism about modern political forms: if sharīʿa once absorbed Arab,
Persian, Indian, and southeast Asian traditions, customs, and styles of reasoning in
law and wrestled with Persianate absolutist monarchism and Turko-Mongol models of
kingship in the political realm, it is at least plausible to think that modern Western
legal and political systems are not so uniquely anti-Islamic as to require relinquishing
sharīʿa’s sociopolitical role. Many mainstream Muslim reformers, not least those
labelled Islamists, are in fact sympathetic to certain modern political forms and see
them as more compatible with sharīʿa than the earlier foreign influences.
Incidentally, the very proposal that sharīʿa-minded Muslims ought to embrace
disestablishment is a political recommendation, a matter of political form, which the
author has contended is extraneous to the concerns of Christianity. As such, this rec-
ommendation appears to be prompted by non-Christian considerations such as the
radical plurality of modern [Western?] societies in which confessional governance
can no longer deliver the desired space for a meaningful religious life. To make this
point, Ralston more than once cites William Connolly’s important works Why I Am Not
a Secularist (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and Pluralism (Duke University
Press, 2005) (pp. 21, 277). But since Connolly sees himself as being on a quest for
an alternative to the existing form of Western secularism, it is not clear which form of
disestablishment Muslims are to prefer over sharīʿa.2 Given, further, that Christianity
survived, at times even thrived, through the fourteen centuries of Islamic history under
sharīʿa and is arguably in dire straits under conditions of disestablishment in the
formerly Christian regions of the modern West, the long view of history should
give Christians pause before demanding that Muslims mimic the path of modern
Christianity.3 In fact, since Christians (and Jews) historically thrived in the lands of
Islam under sharīʿa order and all suffer under the states that Muslims imported from
Europe, might it not be preferable for Christians, as Wael Hallaq in fact advocates, to
live under the rule of sharīʿa?4
Setting aside the politics of disestablishment/secularism, as well as Muslim pub-
lic opinion (which is consistently pro-sharīʿa) and the results of prior and ongoing
draconian attempts at imposing forms of secularism in the Muslim world, a far more
relevant consideration in a dialogical posture is the recognition that Islam is not Chris-
tianity. Law, as law and not as Sunday’s column on social affairs, is central to Islam
in a way that it simply has not been for Christians, as the author so eruditely estab-
lishes. The Qurʾān is adamant that Muslims ought not to pick and choose from God’s
scripture according to their convenience or whim, and not follow the People of the
Book (Q 2:84-5; 5:13-14) in precisely this respect. How could Muslims be truthful to
their scripture if they disestablish Islam? If Christians’ devotion to the “event of
Christ” requires or is compatible with disestablishment, that is hardly an argument for
Muslims. The complaint about schizophrenic secularism which Muslims lodge against
Christianity could also apply to Ralston’s proposal of the future role of sharīʿa: “What
is needed if sharīʿa is to contribute to the flourishing of justice and human rights
in pluralist nations is Muslim jurists proposing frameworks and interpretations of
sharīʿa that are rooted in jurisprudential history and the revelatory sources of Islam
as well as postcolonial and modern realities” (p. 291). How precisely is this to work
if the structure of the national and legal institutions, the foundations of their political
system, the notions of human rights and the very idea of the primacy of rights over du-
2
For an account of his quest and its critique, see C. Fear, “William E. Connolly’s Politics of
Complexity: A Critique”, The Review of Politics 79 (2017) 73-98.
3
See, e.g., “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”, Pew Research Cen-
ter, 17 October 2019; D. Voas, M. Chaves, “Religion is in decline in the West, and America is no
exception”, LSE Blog, 5 September 2016 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/09/05/religion-is-
in-decline-in-the-west-and-america-is-no-exception/ (accessed 18 November 2022).
4
See, for instance, Professor Wael Hallaq’s interview with Al Jazeera published 19 December
2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0_l0NnocAk, especially minute 20 onward (accessed
18 November 2022).
ties, and the notions of justice both social and political are all secular, not to mention,
borrowed? What would be left of sharīʿa apart from a liberal or secular (or as Mus-
lims would say: Christianized and schizophrenic) version if this mission of squaring
the circle is accepted?
Finally, a comment about how contemporary Islamic thought is represented,
characterized, and evaluated even in the best of Western scholarly writing is in order.
Since the author clearly means to engage with Muslims and the sharīʿa, it would have
helped to include the leading representatives of sharīʿa from various existing Muslim
schools.5 An example might help illustrate the point. When commenting on the cru-
cial Muslim belief that “the rule is God’s alone”, the author correctly attributes it to
numerous Muslim scholars past and present. He notes that this “is neither simplistic
nor reactionary but is in fact based on theological commitments that are central to
Islam” (p. 295). However, he also suggests that nearly all living Muslim scholars also
somehow manage to misunderstand its implications. Ralston invokes Professor Carool
Kersten to conclude that those who think that “a confession of divine sovereignty”
requires “a social order based on a government-enforced vision of sharīʿa” are
“conflationists”. This is, we are told, because “the idea that Islam should prescribe a
particular form of human government is more symptomatic of twentieth-century
debates than classical ones” (p. 296). Ralston also cites Professor Tamara Sonn’s
argument that Islam’s “legal codes” are not “flawless” (p. 296).
Ralston’s reasoning at this point in his argument, as well as the selection of au-
thorities he invokes, leave something to be desired. Belief in government-enforce-
ment (namely, that political authority, sulṭān, is bound by God’s law and bound to
enforce it) is just as universal as belief in divine sovereignty (dominion, mulk, be-
longs only to God). This latter is acknowledged by Ralston himself when he approv-
ingly quotes various Muslim authorities, such as Abou El Fadl (“an essential
characteristic of a legitimate Islamic government is that it is subject to and limited by
Sharīʿa law”, p. 296). Even if it is granted that Islam prescribes “no particular form”
of human government, it does not logically follow that sharīʿa cannot be enforced, and
the fact that Islamic legal codes are open to questioning does not have the radical im-
plications that Ralston suggests can be derived from it. Furthermore, the suggestion
that the so-called sharīʿa fundamentalists (namely, all those who demand sharīʿa en-
forcement in some form) are unaware of or in denial of the multiformity of sharīʿa
governance or fallibility of legal codes is misleading. That abhorrent understandings
of sharīʿa exist is not questionable, but whether they are anything more than fringe el-
ements needs to be demonstrated. My concern is with those whom Ralston names as
5
Note that Professor Carool Kersten, a Dutch scholar whose judgment is approvingly invoked
(p. 296), titles one of his monographs Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals
and the Study of Islam (Columbia University Press, New York 2011). The text is a paean to brave
Muslim heretics rejecting sharīʿa.
influential, paradigmatic “fundamentalists”, Sayyid Quṭb and Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī. It

is well-known that Quṭb did not put much stock in legal formulations, let alone con-
sider them timeless, and al-Qaraḍāwī’s name is literally synonymous in the world of
jurisprudence with the call to ijtihād based on modern circumstances and, as Ralston
oddly states elsewhere, with acceptance of forms of democracy (p. 295).
The choice of authorities that are invoked and those that are dismissed, as men-
tioned earlier, is at times unfortunate. The sharīʿa fundamentalism that characterized
Quṭb, “a form of sharīʿa largely stripped of the nuance of fiqh”, Ralston explains,
shapes “popular contemporary Muslim figures” such as al-Qaraḍāwī, and “continues
to fuel much anti-Western discourse” (p. 124). To begin with, this is factually ques-
tionable (since moderate Islamists are often excoriated by their pro-autocracy oppo-
nents as well as hard-liners for being pro-Western, and surveys show that secular
Muslims are just as anti-Western). But more to the point, one cannot avoid noting here
how the overbearing power of Western hegemony to shape and authorize our knowl-
edge casts its shadow on otherwise charitable instances of scholarship committed to
Christian-Muslim scholarly dialog. Muslim scholarship, for instance, has been split on
Sayyid Quṭb, and apart from the militant and secularist ends of the spectrum, numer-
ous nuanced critics, including Muslim Brothers’ leader at the time (the Egyptian judge
Ḥasan al-Huḍaybī), as well as al-Qaraḍāwī, wrote extensively about their disagree-
ment with Quṭb. Any of these would have been more qualified to evaluate Quṭb on the
question of the nuances of fiqh than the authority Ralston invokes (an American Mus-
lim expert on mysticism). What is more, al-Qaraḍāwī is said to be under Quṭb’s in-
fluence and lacking in nuanced knowledge of fiqh. A distinguished graduate of
Al-Azhar University with a doctorate in Hanafi fiqh, author of over one hundred texts
including several major juristic texts, with pioneering work in many areas of fiqh, a
poet and playwright, head of an international body of Muslim jurists, winner of sev-
eral distinguished scholarly awards from numerous Muslim governments, one whose
often lenient and courageous, if at times deeply controversial (and vehemently ques-
tioned, including by this reviewer), juristic opinions are followed by tens of millions
of Muslims, in short, without exaggeration the most globally influential Muslim ju-
rist of the last half century, al-Qaraḍāwī is dismissed as merely a “sharīʿa fundamen-
talist” (pp. 124, 133) on the authority of a couple of Western professors because, well,
he fails to appreciate nuances of fiqh! This is hardly better than my dismissing the
Christological knowledge of the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury on the au-
thority of a professor of Christian art in Malaysia or Egypt. It is precisely because
Professor Ralston is very far from being a stereotypical orientalist or dismissive of
Muslim scholarship that his choice of authorities serves so well to show Western aca-
demic scholarship (including Muslim academics like myself) the structural mirror.
Some factual errors deserve attention. The author seeks to contrast good, dovish
Muslim interlocutors such as Ibn ʿArabī and hawkish ones like Ibn Taymiyya by high-
lighting how Ibn Taymiyya considers Christians polytheists (mushrikūn) and guilty of
corrupting/altering the divine text (taḥrīf) (p. 51 n. 6). It should be noted here that Ibn
ʿArabī did not hold a different view of Christianity on these questions, as has been
pointed out by Gregory Lipton.6 That Christianity is seen as partaking in forms of as-
sociationism (shirk; its translation as polytheism is inadequate) does not prevent Mus-
lim scholars from following the Qurʾān in appreciating aspects of Christianity; after
all the Qurʾān declares equating Jesus to God or the belief that God is “the third of
three” unbelief (kufr) (5:72-73) yet also speaks of Christians’ compassion and humil-
ity (57:27). Elsewhere, Ralston states that “a key feature of many such Wahhabi move-
ments is their rejection of Islamic legal reasoning, particularly analogy, consensus,
and received tradition” (p. 79), which is incorrect insofar as Wahhabism is effectively
Hanbalism and the Saudi-Wahhabi legal system rejects none of these classical legal
tools.7 The claim of Mawdūdī’s dependence on Ibn Taymiyya is stated (p. 294) with-
out any evidence, and is in fact incorrect; Mawdūdī was far more grounded in native
South Asian strands of Hanafism and Maturidism, and did not need Ibn Taymiyya to
develop his ideas on divine sovereignty.
Some trivial corrections, mostly regarding transliteration from Arabic: ʿijmā
should be ijmāʿ (p. 80); Arabophobe should be Arabophone (p. 92); ʿIssa should be
ʿĪsā (p. 97); al-Nisāʿ should be al-Nisāʾ (p. 98); A Correct Reply should be The Cor-
rect Reply (p. 105); Masīh should be Masīḥ (p. 105); Sharīʿtīn should be Sharīʿatayn
(p. 106); jawad should be jawwād (p. 107); ikamāl should be akmal (p. 109); “affir-
mation or” should be “affirmation of” (p. 240 n. 107); al-ʿAshmāwī is often misspelled
as al-ʾAshmāwī; al-Shabbab should be al-Shabāb (p. 295).
It should be clear that the author has succeeded in contributing an erudite, gen-
erous, and engaging text, one that critiques and engages in the best spirit of faithful
scholarship and invites the same. Most Muslims can agree with the author’s poignant
formulation that, “The question that modern and postcolonial life asks is precisely
how submission to sharīʿa is expressed in the political and social organizations of
various Muslim and non-Muslim societies today, and to what extent our social, indi-
vidual, and political lives might cohere with the divine law” (pp. 296-267). A reader
comes away from reading Ralston having learned a great deal not only about Chris-
tianity and Islam and the challenge of law and politics in the two traditions, but also
about the need and potential for dialogical growth in the face of serious challenges
confronting both traditions.
6
G. A. Lipton, Rethinking Ibn ʿArabi, Oxford University Press, New York 2018, ch. 2, open-
ing paragraphs, especially n. 11, where Lipton observes that this was the common Muslim view,
shared by Ibn ʿArabī’s predecessors such as al-Ghazālī.
7
See, for instance, F. E. Vogel, Islamic Law and Legal System: Studies of Saudi Arabia, Brill,
Leiden-Boston 2000.
REVIEW BY JONATHAN CHAPLIN
Joshua Ralston’s outstanding work of comparative political theology is a major

contribution to Christian-Muslim dialogue. It is so precisely because of its chosen
focus on the place of law, which is at the heart of Islam but too often at the periphery
of Christianity. As a Christian political theologian often frustrated by my discipline’s
relative indifference to questions of law, authority and governance, I welcome Ral-
ston’s legal and political focus. Contemporary Christian political theology has enthu-
siastically, and rightly, launched extensive and trenchant deconstructive critiques of the
corruptions of law, authority and governance. Yet, notwithstanding notable excep-
tions, it has often proved shy of articulating alternative normative reconstructions of
them that go beyond mere theological aspiration or ethical platitude. Developing a
credible Christian theology of public law is a pressing demand for the church’s ca-
pacity to engage with Islam intelligently, as well as for the integrity of its larger pub-
lic mission. My own recent engagement with Christian-Muslim dialogue certainly
underscores this need. While I am not competent to assess Ralston’s readings of either
sharīʿa itself or of the Christian-Muslim encounters he reports on, the questions I pose
to his own constructive theology of public law may, I hope, at least assist the latter.
The comprehensiveness and lucidity of Ovamir Anjum’s summary of the book
allow me to delve immediately into the substantive question I want to pose to Ralston’s
constructive proposal (unfolded in Chapters Five and Six). Ralston calls for a “Chris-
tologically-founded theology of public law” as indispensable to a deeper Christian-
Muslim engagement. While I applaud his proposal, I want to press him to elaborate
further on the sources and content of a public law thus founded, not least by drawing
more widely on the resources available in the Christian tradition itself.
Ralston begins by lamenting that the quality of the Christian side of Christian-
Muslim dialogue has been hampered by a reluctance to recognize the centrality of
sharīʿa in Islam and to engage with its detailed substance. Christian commentators
have often deemed it to be, variously, antiquated, repressive, legalistic or simply too
contested within Islam to be a stable partner for coherent engagement. Part of Ral-
ston’s goal here is to dispel the persisting prejudice that sharīʿa is merely a code of
rules (indeed primarily a punitive one), and to show that it is instead a comprehensive
spiritual way of life containing many components that would be understood in Chris-
tian terms as piety, faithfulness, ethics, character, virtue or social justice. The Qurʾān,
for example, “is not a legal manual but a moral invitation to respond to God’s claim
on human life and society” (p. 301).
It emerges that this claim is closely related to Ralston’s bold invitation to Mus-
lim thinkers to detach their commitment to sharīʿa from any aspiration to an Islamic
state tasked with implementing it (an invitation to which Anjum carefully responds).
He asks Muslims to recognize those elements in their tradition implying that “law
rules in and through its moral capacity to shape individuals toward communities of
justice and social welfare, not through a top-down imposition of a political structure”
(p. 301). He therefore lines up behind those Muslim scholars arguing that sharīʿa,
which emerged long before the modern nation-state, is in deep tension with its hubristic
and oppressive practices and cannot be realized through the medium of such a state.8
Christian scholars have for the most part dispensed with the prejudice just men-
tioned in respect of the torah depicted in the Hebrew Bible, recognizing that the term
is not best translated (in English) as ‘law’ but rather as ‘instruction’ in the ways of
God, even while containing properly ‘legal’ elements. Yet Ralston does not then go on
to propose that sharīʿa can only speak today if it is re-interpreted exclusively in such
‘spiritual’ or ‘ethical’ terms. He does point out that an important stream of reformist
Islam calls for a focus not on the literal demands of sharīʿa but on its deeper intent,
expressed for example in notions such as the “higher purposes of the law” (maqāṣid)
and the claims of the “public good” (al-maṣlaḥa al-ʿāmma) (pp. 304-311).9 But Ral-
ston recognizes that this necessary and promising enterprise cannot be pursued at the
cost of emptying sharīʿa of those components of it that do indeed function as divine
‘law’ – that is, specific behavioural injunctions (such as zakāt) that the faithful are
bound to live by. This is so even when it is recognized that the practical outworkings
of such injunctions can only be specified through a process of contested human con-
textual interpretation (as is the case, also, for parallels found in the Bible).
On the contrary, it is the very specificity of sharīʿa as authoritative revealed law
that Christians must confront on its own terms. At least, they must do so if they are
to engage with Islam as it presents itself and has long been experienced by most Mus-
lims, rather than as they might like it to be – after, perhaps, undergoing an Islamic
‘Enlightenment’, or a ‘Reformation’ construed in Protestant terms. These latter
expectations, in effect, say to Muslims: ‘we will engage with you to the extent that you
can make yourself look like us’. Ralston presses Christians who seek dialogue with
Muslims to be aware that, “To ask a Muslim to refrain from submitting their whole life
to the authority and rule of God in the name of interfaith dialogue is like demanding
that Christians abdicate their claims about Jesus, the gospel, and the law” (p. 317).
I would also urge Christians to acknowledge a fact that I myself was slow to appreci-
ate, that what drives many Muslims’ desire to see sharīʿa implemented is not chiefly
an urge to dominate or exclude but rather a resolve to see justice realised. A society
without sharīʿa, they hold, is bound to be characterized by extensive injustice in which
8
Thus, “the manner in which divine authority is legislated in the Qurʾān is not through a par-
ticular political arrangement such as the caliphate but through the moral appeal of revelation and
law” (p. 300). Sharīʿa “cannot be directly applied to the nation-state since it is primarily a persua-
sive, bottom-up, moral-legal system and not a top-down, state-centric, political-legal act” (p. 313).
9
Towards the end of the book he claims that such an approach echoes his own Christian call
for a more eschatologically-oriented reading of law: “When the law is considered through these
categories, it necessarily becomes both contextual and forward-looking – we might even say it will
function on the eschatological horizon. The divine law always exceeds human application, even as
humans consistently must interrogate the demands of God in the present context” (p. 310).
the vulnerable will suffer most. After all, it was Augustine who said that true justice
cannot be present where there is no true worship.
The challenge to engage seriously with sharīʿa will be a formidable one for
Christians whose traditions dispose them to adopt a deprecatory or dichotomized
stance towards law, or a supersessionist stance towards torah (the latter typically in-
forming the former). In such stances, law is depicted as either hostile to, inferior to,
or merely preparatory to, ‘gospel’. In insisting, essentially, that law-conformity is not
itself salvific, much of the Christian tradition has failed to give an account of the in-
dispensable role law must continue to play in the personal and public lives of those
who seek to be transformed by the gospel. Ralston shows how one or more of these
misleading contrasts is at work in three formative thinkers of the tradition, Justin Mar-
tyr, Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther. Some might cavil at elements of Ralston’s
readings here: Thomists might think Aquinas allows gospel to infuse law more than
Ralston allows and Lutherans might think the same of Luther. But there is little doubt
that such dichotomous framings have left much of the Christian tradition under-re-
sourced to develop a subtle and compelling account of law in its various forms. To that
extent, such a legacy has also left Christianity ill-equipped to engage in fruitful ex-
change with Islam, in which the authority of sharīʿa is non-negotiable.
Ralston rightly insists that if a theological account is to be Christian, then law
must indeed be read through the lens of the gospel:
Faith in Jesus as the Kyrios, or Lord, is both the hermeneutical criterion for interpreting
Scripture and the very event that occasions diverse Christian readings of law. Just as the
Qurʾān is the furqān [criterion] by which Muslims interpret religious claims and the stan-
dard by which legal distinctions are made, Christians regard the event of Jesus to be the
furqān by which Scripture is evaluated and the Old Testament laws reinterpreted. (p. 199)
This, we might say, is a ‘non-negotiable’ interpretive principle for Christians;

there could thus never be a direct Christian equivalent to sharīʿa.
Yet in reflecting on the radical meaning of the Christ event, Christian theologians
have, Ralston observes, found themselves needing to elaborate a number of important
distinctions in their understanding of law:10 between Jewish law and “the law of
Christ”; between (as in Aquinas) moral, civil and ceremonial law; between natural law
and positive law; between ecclesiastical law and civil law; and so forth. Christians have
affirmed at least some valid senses of law, while insisting that the gospel is no mere new
code of behaviour.11 But this has not prevented the tradition from being encumbered
with some debilitating inconsistencies and instabilities in its handling of law.
10
These are “necessary to make sense of Scripture’s various affirmations that Jesus has
not overturned (Matt. 5:17) the perfect law of the Lord (Ps. 19:7), which is established forever
(Ps. 111:8), and also that the law has been in some way ‘abolished’ in Christ (Eph. 2:14-15)”.
11 Thus: “Neither antinomianism nor a strict legalism is the most coherent Christian possibility”
(p. 195).
I will focus now on Ralston’s proposals regarding ‘public law’. He claims that
this has too often been assessed by Christian theologians according to criteria other
than the gospel. The gospel may have framed their approach, but “when they turned
to positively considering the place of public law after Christ, they appealed to norms
from culture and nature with little to no integration with the central Christian claims
regarding God’s action in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit or God’s ongoing covenant
with Israel”. This reflects a “[narrowing of] the law’s theological import to an issue
of personal soteriology”, resulting in a construal of public law only in terms of nature
or creation. “Israel’s laws were Christologically rethought, but the civil laws of the na-
tions were by and large left to the realm of nature [...] [resulting in] a somewhat ane-
mic account of civil law” (pp. 195-196).
And not merely “anemic”, but complicit in injustice: “The history of Christianity
is littered with examples of inequality and injustice justified through appeal to nature
or creation.” There are, Ralston acknowledges, “traditions of inquiry that leverage
nature in ways that press toward legal equality across difference”. But this deeply
ambivalent history “confirms the limited possibilities of exclusive appeal to the realm
of either nature or creation” (p. 197).12
Both public and natural law, then, were “left untouched by the radical interruption
of divine justice in the event of Jesus”. Some distinctions remain necessary, but “these
need not be dualisms that too quickly divide God’s work in Jesus Christ and the Spirit
between creation and redemption, the law and the gospel, and the world and the church”
(pp. 202-203). In fact, Ralston notes, it turns out that in both traditions law has been
construed independently of divine revelation: in Christianity, by handing it over to un-
graced nature; in modern Islam, by handing it over to the secular nation-state.
In search of a closer integration of public law and gospel, Ralston makes a strate-
gic decision to engage in a critical reading of Karl Barth’s Christological political the-
ology.13 From a Barthian vantage-point, the entirety of personal and public life is to
be viewed through the lens of the Christ-event, cutting off at the root any dichoto-
mous counterposing of law and gospel.14 Law, for Barth, is not at odds with or merely
preparatory to gospel. Rather, both law and gospel “are part of a single act of grace
and [...] the law is the form of the gospel” (p. 213); it “bears witness” to gospel (p.
216). All human life stands under the divine command, and that command is always
12
“The law regularly testifies against itself. Examples abound of the law being deployed and
theologically justified as an instrument of oppression, from the theological justifications of divine
ownership and rights by colonial powers to the selling of black bodies done under the law of both
nations and God” (p. 268).
13
I leave aside Ralston’s compelling critiques of Barth’s problematic views of Islam and
Judaism.
14
“Barth’s worry about the left hand of God eventually overriding the right hand echoes
Muslim critiques of Christianity as subliminally giving over aspects of our lives to natural demands
and then even baptizing purely secular concerns of cultural practices as the will of God” (p. 250).
controlled by grace.15 Thus, we are bound to obey God, but “not because God is capri-
cious or because these laws are a simple distillation of what is natural for human be-
ings (although they may be), but because God has freed the people from bondage”
(p. 222). Law is a gift proceeding from and reflective of a liberative act of divine justice.16
Distinctively for Barth, this places the authority of the state on a redemptive, not a
natural or even providential grounding, as much of the rest of the tradition has proposed.
This, Barth claims, forcefully accentuates the claim that the legitimacy of the exercise of
that authority is conditional upon the actual justice of the state’s deeds.17 Thus, “There is
no possibility for Christians to grant ultimate legal authority to any state, moral principle,
or legal apparatus if it contradicts the claim of Jesus Christ” (p. 219). The state contra-
dicts this claim when it acts with manifest injustice, as it often does. Public law then be-
comes not a restraint on injustice but its instrument. When the state twists public law for
such a purpose, “the church is free and even compelled to disobey the state’s unjust laws
and to work toward an alternative form of justice” (p. 230). While neither state nor church
can bring in the kingdom, “human communities and political arrangements are nonethe-
less tasked with bearing witness to the divine reign of justice and peace” (p. 231).
What does the state’s task of ‘witness’ to the Kingdom amount to? Here Ralston
rightly finds Barth wanting. In one classic treatment, Rechfertigung und Recht, he ob-
serves, Barth “offers no positive connection between the law of the gospel and the or-
ganization and framework of the state” (p. 233). In The Christian Community and the
Civil Community, Barth goes a step further, specifying the task of the civil community
(the state) as the making and administering of law (p. 236). Barth reaffirms that the
church must never become the state and nor must the state be given ecclesial or reli-
gious sanction. Both institutions remain grounded in God’s Kingdom, and members
of the church must in their participation in the state (which is a duty) testify to this
grounding. Yet, equally, the Kingdom “remains an eschatological reality that stands
in judgment over and against any human effort, ecclesial or political, to usher it in”
(p. 239). The state is at best an “analogue” to the Kingdom insofar as it “concerns it-
self with the so-called secular task of establishing laws, adjudicating cases with equity,
restraining evil, and seeking the common good” (p. 240).
But Ralston laments that when we ask how the gospel informs this task, Barth
offers us little guidance: “Christian decisions which have to be made in the political
15
“If the gospel of Jesus is the criterion of the law, then it must act as the standard by which
Christians are to make moral and political judgments about both ecclesial and public law” (p. 218).
16
“The Kingdom of God is not of this world, but this claim is intended not to depoliticize the
gospel or the Christian community but to orient human beings toward their divine end, which is a
community of justice” (p. 231).
17
As Ralston renders Barth: “The state has legitimate legal authority [over] society insofar as
it seeks justice, restrains evil, and promotes the general welfare of the community. [...] [But] God
does not necessarily affirm every particular political enactment of this God-given political power
since authority is prone to manipulation and misuse” (p. 230).
sphere have no idea, system, or program to refer to but a direction and a line” (quoted
at p. 241). Rather the church must engage in contextual, ad hoc judgements, “[dis-
cerning] in each new situation the specific reality of the government and its laws and
[making] judgments about its consistency with divine justice” (quoted at p. 242). Barth
insists that resort to natural law is of no use here and might simply legitimate injus-
tices. Instead, the church must proclaim the Lordship of Christ over every political au-
thority, and then “[distinguish] between the just and unjust State” (quoted at p. 243).
Yet Barth offers little by way of criteria by which we can make this distinction.
Despite his “Christological actualism”, his theology of law is “too often disconnected
from the concrete historical and ethical demands of political life” (p. 247).18 His ac-
count of law would, Ralston provocatively asserts, “benefit from [...] a healthy dose
of usūl al-fiqh, or the Islamic jurisprudential tradition of reasoning from divine reve-
lation to the contextual demands of the law in a given place” (p. 248).19 Such a pro-
ject “remains an outstanding task for Protestant political theologies that do not wish
to return to natural law as the central frame for public law” (p. 248).
What is required is a theological vision that better integrates the three basic moments
in the biblical narrative: creation, reconciliation and eschatological consummation (as
Kelsey depicts them); the third of these, the arrival of God’s rule, Ralston claims, proving
most fruitful in encounters with Islam (pp. 254-256).20 The content of that rule is “synony-
mous with genuine justice, where peace, freedom, equality, and possibility reign”, and “so-
cial communities, whether they are local, national, regional, or international – are tasked with
struggling to create laws and ways of life marked by these shared aims” (pp. 260-261).21
Ralston rightly presses Christians to move beyond Barth’s frustrating generali-
ties. At the same time, he retains Barth’s insistence that an eschatological vision of jus-
tice can never be fully realised in history. Indeed, justice “may be glimpsed in passing
moments in human law and societal action, but [...] never arrives”. “The law promises
to provide justice for communities, victims, and even for perpetrators of crimes, but
more often than not it is only a pale imitation or chimera for justice” (p. 260).
Three linked assertions flesh out this vision. First, public law is only ever a “wit-
ness” to God’s rule. Law cannot save, yet it can testify to the Kingdom: “No law is the
divine rule of justice, but there are in fact better or worse public witnesses to God’s rule.
Under such a schema, law becomes an appropriate site of public witness and contesta-
18
Ralston echoes those critics who trace this lacuna to Barth’s ethical occasionalism and
divine voluntarism (p. 244). His “turn away from law and toward a theology of command that is
occasional and insufficiently concrete inhibits him from developing his insights more fully” (p. 245).
19
He goes on: “God’s demands are not primarily heard (Barth’s language) but discerned in
and through the painstaking work of interpretation, moral arguments, and social analysis” (p. 247).
20
Thus, “biblical accounts of law are not simply a depiction of what is natural or inherently
moral” but express “the establishment of the divine rule of just grace” (p. 258).
21
He quotes Pannenberg approvingly to the effect that the “kingdom will bring the definite
actualization of an order of justice and peace in the fellowship of humanity” (p. 261).
tion”. Ralston holds that a basic way that the state offers such a witness is simply
“through its legal existence”: “Christian commitments to public law emerge out of a sense
that law is a better ruler than ‘kings’ or brute force in the time between the times” (p. 262).
Second, public law is an “indirect” witness to the rule of God, functioning as a
“moral and even prophetic prod toward justice” (p. 264). It can “gesture toward God’s
coming will for human communities” (p. 264). But this is done “not through [public
laws’] primary focus – which is ‘earthly’ concerns – but as a secondary or accidental
consequence of such action toward equity, justice, and peace” (p. 264).22
One important implication is that “the public religiosity of the government or its
appeals to theological justifications is largely irrelevant. [...] However, human politi-
cal and legal activity and God’s coming kingdom is related only by sharing a task. In
fact, an ostensibly non-Christian public law is just as capable, or even more so, of
gesturing toward the divine rule as a supposedly ‘Christian’ law” (p. 265). This claim,
which I endorse, is of great importance to Christian-Muslim dialogue; Anjum responds
to it instructively from the Muslim side, but I leave it aside here.23 Another claim is
that construing law as indirect witness to God’s rule allows us to recognize law’s “di-
versity, arbitrariness, and banality” (p. 265). Thus laws are “preoccupied with ques-
tions of contract, building permits, inheritance, old statutes, speed limits, and much
more”. While these may be important, “no law needs to be directly tied to the rule of
God in order to hold legitimacy and wisdom” (p. 265).
Third, public law is only a “provisional” witness to God’s rule: “There is no time-
less legal system or blueprint (despite what you might hear about democracy in pop-
ular Christian rhetoric) that God wills for all times and places” (p. 266). Every instance
of public law is thus criticizable, indeed demands critical interrogation.
Deepening the point, Ralston proposes not only an eschatologically-grounded
account but a cruciform one, and this leads to an important exegetical move: “Christian
theological accounts of public law should not be guided first and foremost by Romans
13 or 1 Peter 2:13-17 but by the confession of the crucified and risen Lord” (p. 269).24
Ralston rightly lays the emphasis on the fact that crucifixion was an act done under
Roman public law, whereas Christianity has typically focused overwhelmingly on its
22
Because such a witness is indirect, it is thus “not as clear as the word, table, and font in
church or the continuing practice of Torah observance by Jews or the way that the call to submis-
sion to God is heard through the minaret and enacted in the sharīʿa” (p. 264).
23
Anjum pointedly asks: “How could Muslims be truthful to their scripture if they disestablish
Islam? If Christians’ devotion to the ‘event of Christ’ requires or is compatible with disestablishment,
that is hardly an argument for Muslims”. For a Christian ‘theology of disestablishment’, see J. Chap-
lin, Beyond Establishment: Resetting Church-State Relations in England, SCM, London 2022, ch. 2.
24
It is not entirely clear whether Ralston is implying that Paul’s or Peter’s remarks on
obedience to the state are not so guided. Might he think they are merely contextually-determined
pastoral asides for a church suspected of subversion? For an argument that Romans 13 is much
more than this, see N. Wolterstorff, The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge-New York 2012.
supposed Jewish instigation and thus lost sight of the event’s critical potential for the
practice of public law generally. Whatever its formal legality, the crucifixion was a
grotesque act of public injustice, showing that “Law can and does condemn wrongly
and contradict justice” (p. 270).25 But then “God offers a counter-judgment to Roman
law by raising Jesus to new life. The resurrection is a divine judgment against human
law” (p. 271). In this reading, which relativizes Romans 13, “Divine law [...] presses
upon and against the powers that be and challenges appeal to ‘the law’ and ‘order’ as
a means to maintain social marginalization or oppression. The divine rule promotes a
lawlessness in the face of unjust laws. Put in another theological idiom, the law should
be read first and foremost prophetically and not kingly” (p. 273).26
What ensues here is a destabilizing and potentially subversive account of public
law that challenges all legitimizing or authoritarian accounts.27 Public law must be
evaluated Christologically in the light of the coming kingdom, which means against
the critical eschatological performance targets of “genuine justice, where peace, free-
dom, equality, and possibility reign” (p. 260).
Ralston is aware that such broad injunctions do not yet do all the work needed
to guide Christian engagement with the state and public law. Indeed, he urges Chris-
tians to raise their game by working at specific applications of such injunctions (cit-
ing, for example, Italian Waldensian statements on migrant rights (p. 322). Strikingly,
he proposes that what Christians must come up with is “not simply general statements
but Christian fatwās, nonbinding theo-legal opinions, that call for specific action
around particular laws” (p. 321).28 The challenge this implies for Christian political
theologians is a demanding one:
25
For a Christian lawyer’s assessment of this injustice, see J. Burnside, God, Justice and Soci-
ety: Aspects of Law and Legality in the Bible, Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York 2011, ch. 13.
26
“Law is a fickle witness to justice and is just as likely to bear false witness to the divine rule
as it is to offer a truthful one. Viewing the law as a provisional and indirect witness to the divine
rule allows us to account for both of these two legal limitations. The divine rule stands in graceful
judgment over all human society and thereby demands actions to revise and revisit the law con-
stantly, so that it might bear better witness to the divine rule” (p. 274).
27
“Christians might interpret and engage public law, then, as a site of contestation where pro-
visional and indirect witness to God’s rule is at stake. The law is a witness because it is never able
to be or to usher in the rule of God; it is indirect because public law should be minimally concerned
with the truth about God’s identity and nature; it is provisional since the law is always in need of
critique and re-evaluation and can never be finally settled” (pp. 276-277). Ralston then invites Mus-
lim scholars to recognize echoes of this vision in their own sources: “the Christian theological po-
sition presented [here], particularly the notion of the law as witness during the time between
revelation and consummation, connects with Islamic concerns regarding the distinction between
sharīʿa and fiqh, the importance of divine sovereignty over all of life, and the constant demand to
reexamine legal rulings in light of the purposes of the law” (p. 316).
28
Indeed, “The entire enterprise of Christian ethics is in many ways a form of Christian fiqh.
Debates about marriage, abortion, just war, drone attacks, and genetics are examples of such legal
moral reasoning” (p. 320 n. 104).
The question that should occupy Christian political theologies is not about ‘the law’ in
the abstract or as such, but about this law, that judgment, and this particular societal legal
formation. Law is not only or even primarily the extra-legal values of justice, dignity,
love, equality, retribution, or violence but quotidian cases, common judgments, and legal
renderings. The provisional indirect witness of the law to God’s rule does not principally
come about through abstract appeals to justice but in the complex, entangled, finite, and
often flawed living attempt to bear witness in cases, actions, trials, parliaments, and
protests to the way of justice. (p. 322)
While I fully endorse this proposal, I would press Ralston to spell out yet further
what this enterprise might entail (in a way, echoing Anjum’s claims that Ralston is still
“too abstract”). Let me first note that there is, in places, more specificity in his own ac-
count than he himself acknowledges. We know more about the shape of a just polity
than he has implicitly shown, but this has perhaps been obscured by his strong eschato-
logical reservation about the limited prospects for justice in the saeculum. For his account
already made clear that a regime governed by the rule of law is decisively preferable to
arbitrary rule. It also made clear that not just any laws will do, but just laws i.e., laws
“that struggle toward the pursuit of justice and expansion of care for the oppressed”.
That rules out many actual polities that permit or further systemic corruption or impov-
erishment; such regimes could never be part of the contextually determined suite of le-
gitimate Christian options. Further, he also makes clear that a law-governed polity will
do justice to religious plurality.29 Those three italicized terms, once unfolded, already
amount to substantial principles of just political order that, while not yet precise legal
duties, do amount to powerful enduring (‘universal’?) aspirations for Christians.
I think we can go further. As noted, Ralston claims that “There is no timeless
legal system or blueprint (despite what you might hear about democracy in popular
Christian rhetoric) that God wills for all times and places” (p. 266). I fear that such a
formulation risks downplaying the possibility and authority of the kind of responsi-
ble, cumulative Christian ethical and political reasoning he wants to affirm. To assert
that “democracy” is not “timeless” but is only one contextual possibility is obviously
true as a historical description, but it short-changes the demanding and urgent task of
discerning what kind of political regime is in fact theologically and ethically com-
pelling in our own times. I would submit that, once one takes up that task, it is diffi-
cult not to conclude that some version of a just, constitutional, representative and
participatory government is vastly more desirable in Christian terms than any other
form. For example, Catholic scholar Kenneth Grasso aptly notes that the social teach-
ing of Vatican II clearly reveals a “preferential option for constitutional democracy”.30
29
”Law is the proper rule for how we negotiate the contested and pluralist time of the secu-
lar. It does so...: (1) through the pursuit of just legal frameworks that emphasize equality under the
law [...] and (2) through concrete legal judgments […]. In fact, the pursuit of legal equality under
the law might give witness to God’s indiscriminate grace” (p. 264).
30
“Beyond Liberalism: Human Dignity, the Free Society and the Second Vatican Council”,
I would go even further and assert that such a model is, today, mandatory for all Chris-
tians to work towards, as far as circumstances permit.31
There is often a strange coyness among political theologians on this question.
On the one hand, for reasons like Ralston’s eschatological reserve, they feel bound to
deny that constitutional democracy is the only theologically legitimate regime. Yet on
the other, it is difficult to get them to disavow any discreet feature of a constitutional
democracy in our own times. Who among them would question the necessity of the
three elements already identified (the rule of law, the justice of law, the protection of
religious pluralism)? Or others such as universal adult franchise, the election of pop-
ular representatives and other avenues of political participation, the protection of civil
rights such as freedom of conscience, expression and association, the right to protest,
and many more? When you add up everything that they thereby implicitly endorse,
you end up with something pretty much like a just constitutional democracy.32 To reply
that this is ‘only’ a prudential judgement (rather than, say, a matter of status confes-
sionis) does not mean that it is not thereby compelling.
The point applies more generally to many other matters of public law, with vary-
ing degrees of prudential certainty. It is obviously true that, as Ralston points out,
there is no divine blueprint for the design of something like a “building permit”. But
on closer inspection, his examples of such apparently “arbitrary” or “banal” laws turn
out to raise genuine issues of justice that demand careful scrutiny (indeed, the denial
of, or arbitrary restrictions on, building permits for religious and other independent
civil society organisations are major instruments of oppression across the world,
including in Europe).
A yet broader consideration beckons: on many such matters, Christianity has in
the past exercised a significant formative influence: law of contract and tort, property
law, criminal law, family law, constitutional law, religious freedom law, and much
more.33 It is also worth noting that in this process Christian jurists have appealed to
in K. L. Grasso et al. (eds.), Catholicism, Liberalism and Communitarianism: The Catholic Intel-
lectual Tradition and the Moral Foundations of Democracy, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD
1995, 30.
31
I argue the point in J. Chaplin, Faith in Democracy: Framing a Politics of Deep Diversity,
SCM, London 2021, chs. 1 and 2.
32
If not one replicating the pathological features of our own ‘liberal democracies’, or one
founded on secular liberalism. I explore the prospects for Christian-Muslim convergent on constitu-
tional democracy in “Towards a Monotheistic Democratic Constitutionalism: Convergent Themes in
Oliver O’Donovan, Sajjad Rizvi and Paul Heck”, Studies in Christian Ethics 29/2 (2016) 169-176.
33
See, for example, the wide-ranging series “Law and Christianity” published by Cambridge
University Press, including titles on many such themes. See also R. Cochran, Jr and M. Moreland
(eds.), Christianity and Private Law, Routledge, London 2020, which deals with property law,
law of contracts and tort; J. Witte, F. S. Alexander (eds.), Christianity and Law: An Introduction,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge-New York 2008, which also treats civil disobedience, law
of evidence, law of welfare, criminal law and more. On constitutional questions, see N. Aroney, I.
theologically-informed conceptions of justice that are not mere reiterations of classi-

cal natural law or secular Enlightenment legal thinking, but have been formed by
‘gospel’ insights.
Ralston claims: “That someone is given five years’ imprisonment for a crime of
theft is no more clearly just or unjust – in abstraction – than other current and historic
practices of financial retribution or shunning. Laws are contextually bound, culturally
constrained, contested approximations of justice” (p. 268). But such contextuality does
not absolve us from the task of interrogating the justice, then and now, of such pun-
ishments. For they reflect a variety of weighty matters of justice, such as how theft, and
thus ownership and property, are defined; how theft is assessed in comparison to crimes
against the person; whether such punishments properly belong to state, locality or
family; and whether the church, which long exercised extensive jurisdiction via eccle-
siastical courts over certain criminal or civil matters, should be entitled to do so.
Christian influences on such “banal” matters of law are outcomes of exactly the
kind of painstaking, long-term practices of “casuistry” that Ralston rightly calls for but
does not have space to take up in this book. Few would claim that the end-products
of such reasoning can claim direct divine sanction. But dubbing them “arbitrary” or
“banal” risks confirming both political theologians’ disinterest in them and secular
lawyers’ assumption of their moral neutrality. In fact, the work of retrieving such ac-
complishments, and the ongoing task of building on them, has been and is being done
largely by Christian legal theorists and practitioners rather than theologians. I think,
then, that we should receive Ralston’s commendable and inspiring project as, inter
alia, a stimulus to theologians more fully to acknowledge and learn from the growing
literature in this field.34 While there may be no “sacred jurisprudence”, as he perhaps
pejoratively calls it, there can be what Christian legal theorist Jonathan Burnside calls
a “spiritual jurisprudence” – an account of the content of law expressive of a biblical
account of justice.35 Such a jurisprudence would, inter alia, make for a more ‘match-
fit’ Christian contribution to Christian-Muslim dialogue than Christians, as Ralston
charges, often put up.
As Ralston shows, his strategic choice of Barth as his principal critical source has
the considerable advantage that it generates an account of law resembling Islam’s, in
that it is directly responsive to divine revelation. But his endorsement of Barth’s re-
pudiation of natural law denies to him a longstanding and still-powerful source of
Christian legal thought. Several of the Christian contributions to the legal ideas noted
Leigh (eds.), Christianity and Constitutionalism, Oxford University Press, New York 2022, which
addresses sovereignty, rule of law, democracy, federalism, separation of powers, rights and more;
J. Porter, Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids
MI 2010; C. Wolfe, Natural Law Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006.
34
See, e.g., E. D. Reed, Theology for International Law, Bloomsbury T&T Clark, London
2013.
35
God, Justice and Society, xxix.
above work within or have been shaped by natural law thinking. This tradition is richer
and more responsive to the gospel than he acknowledges and may be more service-
able as a resource for a better Christian-Muslim dialogue on law than he supposes.
Ralston’s (Barthian) critique of the historical distortions and abuses to which
natural law thinking has been put is entirely well-taken. The immediate context of
Barth’s (and Bonhoeffer’s) assault on the language of ‘nature’ was a theologically
egregious use of the language of ‘natural orders’ by Lutheran apologists for national
socialism (language later taken up in defence of apartheid). Such abuses are much
less pervasive today, at least in serious theological reflection. Yet in recovering the best
in the Christian natural law tradition it is indeed necessary to revisit and refresh
the theological vision that first animated it, however much it later lost sight of this.
This is a vision of ‘creation’ as the original, perduring divine gift of ordered goodness
that enables the realization of human flourishing in all its diversity and creativity –
a vision being powerfully rediscovered in, for example, contemporary ecological
theology.36 At the heart of the vision is the recognition that human flourishing does
presuppose such an ‘ordering’; that its shape is not entirely historically contingent or
wholly the product of human design; and that insights into that shape can at least be
partially grasped ‘rationally’ (which is not to say ‘self-sufficiently’ or ‘impiously’) by
any human creature. These claims can be sustained, however much Christians may dis-
pute the actual contents of created orderings. But ‘refreshing’ such a vision demands
exposing the illegitimacy of readings of creation or nature that legitimate static, hier-
archical or patriarchal conceptions, thereby blocking the radical biblical message
of human equality (which Ralston notes also has a natural law grounding). It is such
a message that, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, unleashes natural law thinking as
“subversive”.37 I noted Ralston’s claim that a gospel-oriented vision “renders the le-
gitimacy of the exercise of [state] authority conditional upon the actual justice of the
state’s deeds”. But in the best natural law thinking, it always was.38
Ralston calls for a better integration of “creation, reconciliation and eschatolog-
ical consummation” in an account of public law.39 But he says little about how
36
See, e.g., Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (24
May 2015) https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/ʿpapa-francesco_
20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html (accessed 21 February 2023). This does not use the language
of natural law but reflects such a vision of creation.
37
“Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas”, Journal of Medieval and Early Mod-
ern Studies 26/1 (1996) 61-83. Ralston also concedes, rightly, that “appeals to Jesus can just as eas-
ily reinforce inequality and social injustice as can appeal to natural law” (pp. 245-246).
38
I noted that Ralston holds that public law can witness to the gospel “not through its primary
focus – which is ‘earthly’ concerns – but as a secondary or accidental consequence of such action
toward equity, justice, and peace” (p. 264). But according to natural law thinking, public law should
be primarily oriented to equity, justice and peace. Its purpose is to realise those things within its
‘earthly’ (‘creational’) concerns.
39
Thus: “the biblical account of law is not simply a depiction of what is natural or inherently
‘creation’ might make any real difference to such an integrated account.40 That could
involve multi-layered elaborations.41 But as regards public law, much of the Christian
tradition sees the vocation of public law as, in part, an ordering of created common
goods towards justice. Such goods may be corrupted by the fall but they are both prov-
identially sustained and potentially susceptible to redemptive renewal through the
work of Christ, even in the saeculum. Law may always only be an “indirect provi-
sional witness” to the full eschatological realization of that renewal, but that is true of
all things during the saeculum. An account of public law that more fully incorporated
creation should not stop at depicting what is ‘natural’ or ‘created’, but it should at
least start there.
Earlier I affirmed Ralston’s claim that more serious Christian attention to what
we can learn from the details of revealed biblical law could enhance the prospects for
dialogue with Muslims. But Muslim scholars have also claimed that there is also some-
thing akin to natural law thinking in Islam. Mohammad Fadel, for example, writes:
“Sunni Islam offers a complex tradition of theological, legal and political thought that
attempts to synthesize commitments to following divine law as manifested in a par-
ticular revelation with naturalistic assumptions that revelation, as an empirical matter,
furthers ends that are reasonably intelligible to human beings’ nature as rational be-
ings”.42 If so, a critical retrieval of Christian natural law thinking, and its outworking
in specific contemporary laws and cases, could play a complementary role in the com-
mon exploration by Muslims and Christians of what just public law might look like
today in the diverse political communities we find ourselves inhabiting together.
RESPONSE BY JOSHUA RALSTON
Comparative Theology is an invitation to learning, clarification, and enrichment

carried out through study and dialogue that does not shy away from either differences
moral, but instead must ground our examinations of divine law in broader claims about God and
God’s relationship to the world in creation, providence, and reconciliation” (p. 221).
40
He rightly unpacks this central triad in the fuller claim that, “Theologically speaking, the
movement of creation, election, law, Israel, the prophets, Jesus, the Spirit, and the church are all
activities that seek to establish and make known God’s rule, within both communities and individ-
uals” (p. 260). All can speak to a more rounded account of public law, as the tradition testifies.
See O. O’Donovan, J. L. O’Donovan (eds.), From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian
Political Thought, 100-1625, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids MI 1999.
41
See, e g., J. Chaplin, “Creation, Judgement and the State in Christianity and Islam”, The
Muslim World 106/2 (2016) 306-312, and the articles by Mohammad Fadel, Joan Lockwood
O’Donovan and F. Russell Hittinger in this special issue (“New Conversations in Islamic and
Christian Political Thought”).
42
M. Fadel, “Nature, Revelation and the State in Pre-Modern Sunni Theological, Legal and
Political Thought”, The Muslim World 106/2 (2016), 289.
or disagreements. As a Christian theologian, I learn where I stand and where I fall

short, and even discover new areas to explore by thinking not only in relation to my
own tradition, but just as importantly through engaging with Islamic thought and Mus-
lims. This brings risks and will result in shortcomings, mistakes, and mischaracteri-
zations, but the work of Comparative Theology does not shy away from these
inevitabilities.43 It is inspired instead by the hope that the ongoing task of doing the-
ology across religious borders will result in the types of learning that Catherine
Cornille sketches out powerfully in her important new book, Meaning and Method in
Comparative Theology.44 Our own views are sometimes intensified and reaffirmed by
comparative work, while at other times we must recover hidden aspects of our tradi-
tion or even rectify our own mistakes.
My book, Law and the Rule of God: A Christian Engagement with Sharīʿa,
sought to carry out such comparative work through attention to the theological and po-
litical importance of law within my own Protestant Christian tradition and in Sunnī Is-
lamic thought. I learned and was changed by my engagement with Muslim thinkers,
both living and long departed, and sought to invite others, especially my fellow West-
ern Christians, into thinking afresh about the powerful vision of justice present in Is-
lamic discourse on sharīʿa. It is a privilege and an honour, then, to have my book
read, engaged, and critiqued by two generous and yet critical thinkers, one a Sunnī
Muslim and the other a Reformed-Anglican Christian. The writings of Professor
Ovamir Anjum and Dr Jonathan Chaplin, both in this review but more importantly in
their own scholarship, offer us all deeper reflection on the questions of law, justice, the-
ology, pluralism, and politics. Their reviews enact the type of comparative theologi-
cal learning that is possible through honest engagement that does not skirt around
particularity or significant theological differences about God, revelation, salvation,
and politics, but allows disagreements to sharpen us all. They read me fairly and re-
port my positions with clarity and nuance, both hallmarks of Comparative Theology’s
hermeneutical commitments. They also both offer stringent arguments against some
of my conclusions and press me to clarify further where my thinking fell short or
backed away from its own implications. For all of that and to them, I am thankful. This
symposium, so thoughtfully organised by David Marshall, will hopefully serve as
43
I am grateful to Professor Ovamir Anjum for pointing out a number of mistakes in my read-
ing of the Islamic tradition, as well as mischaracterisations of figures. Anjum rightly points out a num-
ber of errors and biases in my readings, such as the problems in my casual reading of the relationship
between Salafīs and the Ḥanbalī school, or depiction of Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī as a sharīʿa fundamentalist
when al-Qaraḍāwī actually has engaged in significant ways with ijtihād and maqāṣid discourses.
These, as well as the various errors in reading and transliteration, are mine. I will turn to some of
the more substantial problems that these mistakes bring with them in the body of this response.
44
C. Cornille, Meaning and Method in Comparative Theology, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken NJ
2020. She names six types of learning that are possible, although not always or necessarily present,
in Comparative Theology: intensification, rectification, recovery, reinterpretation, appropriation,
and reaffirmation.
a small contribution to the continued practice of Christian-Muslim comparative

theological engagement over law and the divine rule.
Comparative Theology does not seek to be comprehensive; I do not purport to
account for all Christians or to speak for all Muslims. My work, both in Law and the
Rule of God and in my other theological works, is shaped by certain recurring inter-
locutors from my own ecumenical Reformed Protestant tradition and largely from the
Ashʿarī and Ḥanbalī Sunnī traditions of theology and law that I know best. There are
important advantages to focusing on specific thinkers or traditions and limiting the
scope of our thinking and engagement, even if this leaves Christian thinkers more in-
clined toward natural law or strict accounts of the two kingdoms underrepresented in
the book. The benefit of my own approach, and one that I am grateful to Anjum for
seeing, is that the Reformed Protestant tradition, especially the Barthian and post-
Barthian trajectories that influence my constructive work, lends itself in powerful
ways to engagement with trajectories of Sunnī thought.45 Anjum rightly notes that
“Ralston situates himself in what appears to be a progressive scripturalist Christian-
ity. This allows him to take Islam, a tradition in which the primacy of revelation is at
the heart of legal and even theological reflection, more seriously than the many Chris-
tian students of Islam who tend to privilege Islam’s rationalist strands.” My aim, al-
though I may have failed, as Anjum argues later in his review, was to engage with
Sunnī Islamic thought on its own terms and not ask for a Muslim Luther or Islamic Re-
formation. This includes recognising the primacy of revelation within Islamic ju-
risprudence, while not negating the importance of creation as offering signs of God.
I was reticent to ground a theology of public law in natural law not only because
of my readings of Barth, but also because natural law does not figure prominently as
a starting point in fiqh. It is revelation, both the divine speech of the Qurʾān and the
prophetic examples and teaching in the ḥadīth, that forms the ultimate basis for sharīʿa
and fiqh. Custom, reason, consensus, analogy, and independent judgement are all de-
ployed by jurists, even as these are all tied back – either explicitly or implicitly – to
divine revelation. This is in part why I did not opt to develop my work primarily
through natural law traditions of either Thomas Aquinas and the varied modern
Catholic thinkers like Jean Porter or the renewed interest in natural law in the Re-
formed tradition among figures like David Van Drunen. While there are aspects of
natural law, or soft natural law as Anver Emon calls it, in the Sunnī tradition, this is
not the primary mode of legal reasoning around sharīʿa.46 The real challenge of sharīʿa
discourse in classical and modern Muslim thought, then, is not fully addressed by
45
I do think more Protestant-Sunnī theological and ethical dialogue is of vital importance for
the development of Christian-Muslim comparative dialogue which to this point has had far more
Catholic-Shīʿa exchanges in European and North American scholarship. For more on this, see my
essay “The Place and Function of Islam in Reformed Dogmatic Theology”, Muslim World 107
(2017) 754-776.
46
Anver M. Emon, Islamic Natural Law Theories, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010.
turning to natural law but by lingering over the challenges presented to Christians by
an alternative claim to revelation after Christ, one that purports to correct errors in
Christian theology and practice. The decision to eschew natural law as the basis for
Christian-Muslim debate on public law was occasioned in large part by my engagement
with Islamic thought and how I understand the methods of Comparative Theology.
That, however, does not fully address Chaplin’s call for me to engage more with
nature or natural law, especially given my references to creation as important for think-
ing about public law.47 Granted, my own theology of law is more interested in and at-
tentive to questions of history and time than to creation. There are costs to this that
Chaplin rightly points out and my account would have benefitted if I had explored
how creation and creatureliness set limits on law or may be a source of affirmation of
the dignity of all creatures. In his review, Chaplin points to the possibilities of natu-
ral law being a means to affirm the radical dignity of human beings or to see “creation
as the original, perduring divine gift of ordered goodness that enables the realization
of human flourishing”. This may be possible and I am not averse to affirming cre-
ation as good or, as Calvin describes it, as a theatre of God’s glory.
Natural law may do all these things, but as I note at the end of Chapter Four, it
was also invoked to justify colonial endeavours, the conquest and destruction of the
native American populations, and the enslavement of human beings, even as some
thinkers deployed natural law to challenge these very same practices.48 The creation,
though essentially good, is also marked by a deep and abiding sinfulness, one that in-
fects human knowing and acting. Natural law – like nearly any legal foundation – has
been the source of both injustice and justice. Natural law may be subversive, but it is
only radical when human judgements and decisions discern it and apply it as such. Put
differently, natural law still demands a significant amount of interpretative work to
connect to concrete cases of legislation and legal rulings. For example, in his influ-
ential work on natural law, John Finnis has to account for how the seven basic goods
of natural law might be worked out in legal communities, which is a task that involves
politics, history, judgment, and discernment of cultural possibilities. Interestingly,
I think that Finnis’ ideas on this point are similar to those expressed by thinkers like
Ibn ʿĀshūr or Jasser Auda in debates on how the maqāṣid al-sharīʿa might relate to
contemporary legal communities. It is this interpretative work and the various differ-
47
While Chaplin is right to see that my work is influenced strongly by certain trajectories in
Karl Barth’s theology of the law and of politics, my own position as I lay it out at the beginning of
Chapter Six is even more reliant on Wolfhart Pannenberg on the one hand and Kathryn Tanner
on the other. Pannenberg’s critique of natural law, Bonhoeffer, and Barth, and his reading of law in
history and community, remains one of the more provocative works on law by a theologian in
the last half century.
48
Anjum asks how a Christian theology of public law might address the ravages of colonial-
ism and how ardent secularism has been imposed on Muslims. I do note this problem on page 117
and again at the end of Chapter Four and in Chapter Six.
ences in legal organisations and rulings that my work is most interested in, not appeals
to natural law. This is in part because my book’s primary aim is not so much to develop
a complete and coherent theology of law and politics, but to point Christian theolo-
gians toward the task of engaging the law and laws as sites of discernment and action.
Still, I agree with Chaplin that more elaboration is needed about how my ac-
count of public law as indirect provisional witness to the divine rule makes sense of
creation. I do offer a reading of law as both a response to divine liberation and God’s
rule on the one hand, as in the giving of the law and the formation of the people of Is-
rael at Sinai, and I also read the law as pointing ahead to an eschatological horizon
when God’s rule of just grace will be all in all. Even if my reading shifts away from
certain Protestant renderings of the law as only highlighting sin or restraining wrong
doing, I still lean into a soteriological focus of law. Thinking about how scripture tes-
tifies to creation setting limits on our time, and the wisdom it offers on how to engage
with other humans and the land, and how to cultivate just dealings with strangers and
enemies alike: all these are lacking in my project. Mea culpa.
Further engagement with biblical texts, especially those on law and creation in
books such as Deuteronomy, Proverbs, or even James, would have enriched and deep-
ened my project, allowing me to clarify how the law sustains communities across
time, seeks justice, and presses forward in hope for alternative ways of living. Such
deeper biblical engagement, especially with the First Testament/Hebrew Bible, would
have also provided me with more resources to begin to address some of the challenges
that Anjum raises when he asks if “any guidance at all” for law and politics can be
found in the event of Jesus Christ.49 My consistent appeals to judge all law in light of
the event of Jesus Christ are not meant to exclude engagement with the legacies of law,
creation, and justice in the First Testament. God’s dealings with the ancient people of
Israel remain a touchstone for Christian theological reflection on law and theology, as
powerfully pointed out by Oliver O’Donovan and Katherine Soderegger in recent
times.50 Deeper exegetical engagement with these texts, and not just critiques of how
they are read by Justin Martyr, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther, would not only
have strengthened my theology of public law and creation, but would also have al-
lowed me to explicate how Christian readings of scripture might offer guidance and
49
I do read the event of Jesus Christ, including his teachings, ministry, proclamation of the
Kingdom, association with outcasts and sinners, affirmation of the law and challenges to its inter-
pretations, as well as what Christians believe about his death and resurrection as having import for
legal thinking. The Christ event, however, is the centre of God’s larger dealings with humanity in
creation, law, prophets, Israel, and the Gentile world. Explicating this more clearly is a task for
future work in dialogue both with other Christians and with Islamic critiques of Christian ethics.
50
While I was writing this response to Anjum and Chaplin, Oliver O’Donovan presented the
Cunningham Lectures at Edinburgh, in which he argued for the importance of law in political
theology and averred that Deuteronomy is a foundational text for legal and political thinking in so
far as it ties together God, community, human judgement, and moral hope.
grounding for reflection on our legal life together. That is to say, since I did not base
my approach on natural law as such, the project needed more clarity on how my scrip-
tural grounding of law moves back into the history of God’s dealing with Israel and
other nations, and also on how such an approach enables us to address various cultures,
histories, and political contexts in our own day. I will return to this at the end of
my response, but first it is vital to address Anjum’s most stringent critique of my work,
focused on my final chapter.
Let me return to my own approach to Comparative Theology in order to clarify
my own position on Islamic governance and sharīʿa in the final chapter. As I attempt
to explain in the opening chapter, the work of Christian-Muslim Comparative Theol-
ogy must account for real differences and divergences around history, scriptures, sal-
vation, law, and more. It should not seek to erase difference or result in what Cornille
calls meta-confessional theology. There are places that I cannot go with Muslim
thought, bound as I am to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ as scripture testifies to
this. Similarly, Anjum and other Sunnī Muslims will demur from views and positions
that I hold. As Anjum rightly notes, the Christian logic that I use to argue for the law
as an indirect witness to God’s eschatological rule, and thus my preference for dises-
tablishment, is not necessarily convincing for all or most Muslims. I was not intending
to call Muslims to dissociate sharīʿa with modern law or politics. Part of the power of
the Muslim vision and practice that I sketch in Chapter Three is how it challenges
Christians to recognise how justice is largely enacted through concrete legal questions
and problems. To riff off Anjum, Sunday columns or church white papers do not
justice make. As Anjum says, law as law has been more important to Muslims than to
Christians. It is vital to recognise this and not try to turn Islam into Christianity.
The history of Islam and the divine revelation that binds the umma both testify
to the importance that religious affiliation, piety, wisdom, and just character all play
in political rule. This is reflected not only in the works of Islamic political theory that
I engage, such as those of al-Māwardī, al-Juwaynī, and Ibn Taymiyya, but also in the
establishment of the umma in Medina and in the complicated and often tragic rival-
ries and wars between Muslims after the death of the prophet Muḥammad. Law, its en-
forcement, and political power were and are integral to Muslim practices from the
beginning. I recognise this and try to account for it throughout the book, including
references to many of the above thinkers, as well as analyzing how various Muslim
empires were shaped both by the sharīʿa and by the task of commanding the right and
forbidding the wrong. I argue that these histories of siyāsa and sharīʿa involve far
more political wisdom, pluralism, and legal reasoning than many Christian or secular
thinkers recognize. There was no single Islamic form of legal and political gover-
nance, but a variety of configurations. It may be that I have relied too much on my
reading of recent scholarship, such as by Wael Hallaq and others, that seeks to con-
trast pre-colonial Muslim legal traditions with the hegemony of the modern state. My
interpretation of them was not meant to argue that the law was never imposed or en-
forced in classical Muslim empires, but to draw attention to the fact that in pre-mod-
ern Muslim societies law was enforced through mechanisms that were quite different
from those of the modern state.
The primary aim of the concluding chapter is not, then, to suggest how Muslims
should proceed in thinking through the many and vexed questions around sharīʿa, the
modern state, post-coloniality, and the problems and possibilities of modernity. In-
stead, I was hoping to illustrate how debates within Islamic thought about, on the one
hand, divine and human sovereignty, and, on the other, the implementation of divine
law and the possibility of excess in this process, might offer locations for further Chris-
tian-Muslim dialogue and debate. Here, I am grateful to Anjum for pressing me not
to rely overly on Western scholarship on Islam and to seek alternative conversation
partners, especially either jurists or critical thinkers like Syed Muhammad Naquib al-
Attas or Ismail Raji al-Faruqi.51 While I would defend my engagement with Muḥam-
mad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī, I should have chosen a conversation partner other than
Muḥammad Saʿīd al-ʿAshmāwī, especially given his association with the Egyptian
regime and his lack of real Islamic arguments. I chose al-ʿAshmāwī more for his
critical reading of Islamist accounts of sovereignty than for his positive alternative,
although in so doing I provide support for a false binary between, on the one hand, an
ardent secularism that supports dictatorship, and, on the other hand, an Islamism de-
fined only by early figures such as Sayyid Quṭb. My thinking here was less influenced
by Carool Kersten, whose work Anjum laments me using, and more by Arab thinkers
like Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘ and Abdelilah Belkeziz. Since their work was published
there has been significant nuance within Islamic political theologies of law in recent
decades, both in Islamist and other forms. As I note in an extended footnote on page
292, I hope to engage these further in the future.
None of this fully addresses Anjum’s real concern, which is that when I come to
questions about the modern state I back off from serious engagement with Islamic
law, history, and thought, opting instead for more of a liberal Christian or orientalist
approach. He is correct to note both some ambiguity and ambivalence in my discus-
sion of this question, but let me try to clarify what I was and was not intending to do,
which may also aid in addressing Chaplin’s opposite concern that I am not a fulsome
enough defender of liberal democracy. The main question that I am attempting to ad-
dress is how to make sense of the power and sovereignty of the modern nation-state
in relationship to claims of divine law. How might Christians and Muslims, not to
mention others like Jews and Hindus, who believe in a law that supersedes the law of
the state, relate to the laws that the state enforces? Must these be grounded in explicit
appeals to religious justification to have theological or practical merit? Might appeals
51
I have written on al-Faruqi’s critique of Christian ethics and “savourism” in my chapter on
the atonement and ethics in “Judgements on the Cross: Resurrection as Divine Vindication”, in C.
Cornille (ed.), The Atonement and Comparative Theology: The Cross in Dialogue with Other Re-
ligions, Fordham University Press, New York 2021, 214-238.
to religious authority by the state actually be more about state power than about divine
laws? How do appeals by state power, whether secular as in France or with religious
justification as in, say, modern India, account for religious communities that are mi-
norities or dissent from the dominant power?
These are all questions relevant to Christians and Muslims alike and are worth
significant thought. I lay out my own Christian theological view before turning to var-
ious Muslim debates. Here I briefly mention two very different scholars, Wael Hallaq
and Abdullahi An-Naʿim, who both argue that within the confines of the modern state
a sharīʿa state is an impossibility. Their reasons are complex, with Hallaq critiquing
the modes of power and hegemony of the modern state while An-Naʿim’s argument
prioritizes a more liberal account of freedom of religion. My own view, however, is
that while their arguments about an Islamic state being impossible may or may not
have theoretical merits, the practical reality, as pointed out by Noah Salomon and
Huessen Ali Agrama, not to mention Anjum in his contribution to this symposium, is
that sharīʿa is practiced and enforced by various states and in different contexts today.
While my book does raise questions about the enforcement of sharīʿa, and especially
its impact on Christians and other non-Muslims, I do not mean to suggest a “Chris-
tian-style secularization” (p. 315), and I do recognise that it is through actual laws
and practices that sharīʿa is expressed (even if not exhaustively). The idea that human
judgements witness to God’s judgment without fully becoming God’s judgment may
be a position that is too influenced by my own theology to convince Anjum and some
other Muslim scholars, but the argument was meant to express hesitancy about mod-
ern enforcement of religious law, not to rule it out as such. I do think there are real dan-
gers when religious logic is deployed to justify state action, especially in the context
of modern means of state overreach, but that does not mean that all practice of law
grounded in divine authority is necessarily problematic. This is why the book does
not conclude with a theological authorisation of any single mode of governance. Even
if my preferences are for disestablishment and liberal democracy, with protection of
dissent and minorities, there may be other models that offer justice, community, and
the rule of law, and help us adjudicate differences. The theo-legal and political op-
tions cannot be limited to either ardent secularism or to religious enforced laws by
the nation-state. There are a myriad of other possibilities that Muslim thinkers may
want to pursue, such as Anjum’s call for a renewed vision of the caliphate and global
Muslim solidarities, with modes of federalism and local representation.52 I do not see
my work as advocating for one of these or the other, but as inviting engagement and
debate with all who are concerned about how human rule relates to divine justice.
This ambivalence in my own thought and writing leads me to conclude with what
I take to be the most powerful critique of my work by Anjum and Chaplin. They both
52
Ovamir Anjum, ‘Who Wants the Caliphate?’ https://yaqeeninstitute.org/ovamiranjum/who-
wants-the-caliphate/published 31 October 2019.
argue, in different ways, that my account of public law in Chapters Five and Six is rel-
atively underdeveloped, abstract and even anaemic. I myself recognize (p. 322) the
irony that my preoccupation with macro theological issues of law has not been ac-
companied by a fleshed-out account of law in practice. I ask Christians to ground our
theology of public law in the event of Jesus Christ and the witness of scripture to him,
but do not sufficiently develop what this means. For instance, in the chapter on Barth,
I claim that something like uṣūl al-fiqh might have helped Barth, and might help Chris-
tians today, to move from abstract appeals to concrete legal judgments. Anjum con-
tends that this move becomes difficult, if not impossible, without clearer grounding in
a “bounded set of authoritative texts, whose divine authorship is the lynchpin of the
entire system”, as in Islamic jurisprudence. I accept this critique and do admit that the
book does not develop fully the kind of work that it calls for, which would demand
fuller accounts of law, legislation, the role of judges, and readings of the Christian
scriptures. That said, the work never intended to be a comprehensive theology of the
law or theory of jurisprudence, but more an invitation for further theo-legal debate
and reflection on Christian theology in relation to Islamic thought. I do think that the
Christian scriptures, understood as a revelation of God’s dealings with humanity, can
form a basis on which to develop contemporary legal reasoning, while recognizing that
they cannot be the exclusive source for such reasoning. There are numerous examples
of this approach both in Christian history and in modern Christian practice. The de-
velopment of Christian-inflected forms of jurisprudential reasoning are already oper-
ative in Catholic Social Teaching. In my own tradition, I am hoping to show how
Protestant theologians might take the law more seriously as the fundamental site for
political theology, although doing so will demand more conversation with jurists and
lawyers, as Chaplin rightly observes.
While my own position is not fully developed in the book, I did aim to sketch the
contours of my own theology of public law and to suggest a few concrete areas where
joint Christian-Muslim approaches to public law might be manifested today, such as
over issues around finance and migration. I am therefore grateful that Chaplin notes
these points, especially the primacy of justice, respect for religious pluralism, and the
rule of law, as well as the two short illustrations on the shared work on banking de-
veloped together by Muslims and Christians here in Edinburgh and the challenges to
migration laws in Italy. Chaplin is correct that procedural questions of law, or debates
about property rights or building contracts, or many other mundane legal realities have
much more importance than my book suggests. For instance, debates over public space
and worship, be they in France or Egypt, impinge deeply on Muslims and Christians
alike and raise vital questions about freedom of worship, self-expression, and com-
munity-organising. Moreover, the loss of public spaces and the commons through
legal or private financial manoeuvrings does raise questions about the common good
and creation that are not merely banal. As such, while my reference to the “banality”
of the law may have been infelicitous and thus misleading, I did end the final chapter
by arguing that “quotidian cases, common judgments, and legal renderings” demand
more attention than Christian theologians, ethicists, and political theologians have
given them (p. 322).53
Let me conclude by stating the primary aim of the book. It is first and foremost
a work of Christian theology responsive to Islamic thought.54 It offers neither a fully
developed public theology nor a coherent vision of Christian or Islamic politics. I
aimed to think as a Christian theologian about law in conversation with Muslims. In
so doing, one of the main goals was to combat Christian and secular dismissals of Is-
lamic legal thinking and to call attention to the powerful and persuasive vision of law
present in the history of Islamic thought and practice. Whether it was gained through
reading my work or from his own history of engagement with Muslims, I deeply ap-
preciate the insight expressed by Chaplin when he notes that “what drives many Mus-
lims’ desire to see sharīʿa implemented is not chiefly an urge to dominate or exclude
but rather a resolve to see justice realised. A society without sharīʿa, they hold, is
bound to be characterized by extensive injustice in which the vulnerable will suffer
most.” In my writing, my chief interest is this call to justice and to reflection on how
human laws might bear witness to divine justice. As such, the book ends as an invita-
tion to ongoing debate and action, not as a definitive programme for public law in all
times and places, either for Christians or Muslims. In so far as the reviews by Anjum
and Chaplin have prompted me to think more deeply about the law, justice, creation,
pluralism, and the state in conversation with these two brilliant scholars with shared
interests and diverging opinions, I am even more convinced about the need for a com-
parative political theology.
53
I had considered including an epilogue mentioning three or four of my own Christian
fatwas on current issues like migration law around indefinite detention in the United Kingdom, or
tax haven and banking laws in the United States, to explore what my call for concrete judgements
might look like in practice. This symposium has made me see that the book would have been
improved had I done so.
54
This phrase “Christian theology responsive to Islam” is taken from Professor Daniel
Madigan, S.J.
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MUSLIMS, CHRISTIANS AND LAW - Anjum Ralston

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ISLAMOCHRISTIANA 48 (2023) 1-36

Ovamir ANJUM, Jonathan CHAPLIN, Joshua RALSTON*

MUSLIMS, CHRISTIANS AND LAW:

REVIEW BY OVAMIR ANJUM

influential, paradigmatic “fundamentalists”, Sayyid Quṭb and Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī. It

REVIEW BY JONATHAN CHAPLIN

Joshua Ralston’s outstanding work of comparative political theology is a major

This, we might say, is a ‘non-negotiable’ interpretive principle for Christians;

theologically-informed conceptions of justice that are not mere reiterations of classi-

RESPONSE BY JOSHUA RALSTON

Comparative Theology is an invitation to learning, clarification, and enrichment

or disagreements. As a Christian theologian, I learn where I stand and where I fall

a small contribution to the continued practice of Christian-Muslim comparative

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