Book Review: Between Allah and Jesus by Peter Kreeft

Pages: 188
Pub­lisher: Inter­var­sity Press
Year:  2010
Author: Peter Kreeft

Between Allah and Jesus: What Chris­tians Can Learn from Mus­lims (here­after BAJ) is a nov­el­ized dia­logue between a Mus­lim and Chris­tians, fea­tur­ing some char­ac­ters that will be famil­iar to those who have read Kreeft’s pre­vi­ous work. ‘Isa Ben Adams makes his return as the pro­tag­o­nist, along with Libby Rawls, “a sar­cas­tic, sassy Black fem­i­nist ‘lib­eral’” (p. 13; both orig­i­nally seen in A Refu­ta­tion of Moral Rel­a­tivism). Fr. (Father) Fesser is another famil­iar char­ac­ter from Socrates Meets Jesus, while the rest of the char­ac­ters appear to be orig­i­nal to this book -  Evan Jellema, “a very straight dutch Calvin­ist”, Father Heerema, “‘Isa’s kindly, wise, old-fashioned Jesuit phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege” and ‘Mother’, “a large, hos­pitable, bread-baking lady who wears bright dresses, has a par­rot on her shoul­der and holds con­ti­nents of com­mon sense in her brain”.

BAJ notice­ably dif­fers from Kreeft’s other dia­logues in that it resem­bles a novel (“nov­el­ized dia­logue”) — even though Kreeft tells us it is not intended to be, p. 14 — whereas his past efforts strictly fol­low the ‘Socratic dia­logue’ for­mat. As BAJ is the result of Kreeft’s yet to be released novel, An Ocean Full of Angels, his worry at the out­set of the book is that, “with­out the novel to frame them, the char­ac­ters in this book are bound to be some­what thin and flat, even stereo­typed” (p.14). A jus­ti­fied worry. Being famil­iar with some of these char­ac­ters from Kreeft’s other nov­els (A Refu­ta­tion of Moral Rel­a­tivism had me think­ing ‘Isa Ben Adams was much older than a stu­dent) I pos­sess some back­ground knowl­edge of the ‘key play­ers’. I couldn’t imag­ine some­one pick­ing up this book with a fresh slate — with the excep­tion of ‘Isa Ben Adams and ‘Mother’, the char­ac­ters tend to be exactly as Kreeft wor­ried, stereotypical.

This is not Kreeft at his best, but that does not mean that this is nec­es­sar­ily bad. BAJ is divided into 16 chap­ters, each deal­ing with loosely related top­ics. Chap­ter 3 addresses the dif­fer­ences between Jesus and Moham­mad while chap­ter 7 addresses the ques­tion, “who goes to heaven?”. Chap­ter 12 address Islam and pol­i­tics while chap­ter 16, abor­tion and com­pas­sion. I enjoyed chap­ter 16 most of all, and it is clear that this is an area Kreeft has dealt with exten­sively. Chap­ter 7 is per­haps the most impor­tant to Kreeft’s the­ses, and I’m not sure I com­pletely under­stood what he was try­ing to say. Kreeft seems to be adopt­ing a line of rea­son­ing sim­i­lar to the one pro­posed by Lewis in The Last Bat­tle, where a per­son may be granted sal­va­tion pro­vided they wor­ship “God” accord­ing to the truth they have (p. 102–105). What made me most uncom­fort­able about this book, how­ever, is what I took to be the repeated sug­ges­tion that whether one wor­ships Yah­weh, Jesus or Allah, they are wor­ship­ing the same God. Much like the in-book char­ac­ter Evan Jellema, I’m not sure if this is good the­ol­ogy or phi­los­o­phy. Per­haps even more prob­lem­atic, there seemed to be a super­fi­cial­ity about these dia­logues that triv­i­al­ized any of the seri­ous the­o­log­i­cal issues between characters.

At the end of the day, BAJ sim­ply isn’t on the same level as Kreeft’s other dia­logues. BAJ presents an inter­est­ing con­cept, one which caught my atten­tion, but not one that ulti­mately suc­ceeds. If you’re a ‘fan’ of Peter Kreeft (I would con­sider myself such a per­son, and am patiently wait­ing for An Ocean full of Angels) and inter­ested in what this book might pro­vide, then go ahead and give it a read, it will be worth your time. Oth­er­wise if you’re new to Peter Kreeft, I would rec­om­mend start­ing with one of his other books (such as Socrates Meets Jesus, Between Heaven and Hell, or The Unaborted Socrates).

Many thanks to the peo­ple at Inter­var­sity Press for pro­vid­ing a copy of this book for review pur­poses.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Socrates Meets Jesus by Peter Kreeft
2. Book Review: Three Approaches to Abor­tion by Peter Kreeft
3. Book Review: The Unaborted Socrates by Peter Kreeft
4. Book Review: Mak­ing Sense of Suf­fer­ing by Peter Kreeft
5. Book Review: Between Heaven and Hell by Peter Kreeft