With Law and the Rule of God: A Christian Engagement with Sharīʿa, Joshua Ralston aims to fill what he sees as a lacuna in recent Christian theological writing about Islam: Christian theologians do not seem to know what to say about the Islamic sharīʿa from a theological perspective. Seeking to eschew both “outright polemics or essentializing apologetics of sharīʿa,” Ralston proposes “an approach that that engages in honest, nuanced, 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” (10).

But what does it mean to “engage” with sharīʿa from a Christian theological perspective? What are the precise questions posed when believing Christians think and write about another Abrahamic faith’s conception of the divine law? And what are the intellectual, moral, and epistemic stakes of this inquiry? One answer is that Christian theologians ought to pursue a set of questions from within the theology of law that seek to question, or even deconstruct, secular Enlightenment assumptions about law. For example, Ralston raises the following questions that Christians ought to pursue beyond polemics or apologetics: “What is the use of the law? Is the secular as neutral as it claims to be? What exactly is sharīʿa? How do we negotiate difference in ways that are both charitable and just? Does the law have any basis beyond itself? How might we live in a world of competing religious identities? What is the function and aim of the law, both theologically and politically, within such diverse contexts?” (10–11). Still, the stakes here are opaque. Do these questions have primarily theological and epistemic implications, or are they about how to manage disputes in the public sphere? Are Christians learning to better understand Islam and its uneasy fit within a modern secular public sphere, or are Islamic understandings of sharīʿa meant to test and expand Christians’ understanding of the divine and which human forms of worship approach it? What is the fundamental difference between the ways that Christians and non-Christian secular thinkers ought to engage the sharīʿa?

Ralston proceeds through a significant amount of very valuable and astute brush-clearing. He surveys much recent Christian political theology (including such figures as Eric Gregory, Oliver O’Donovan, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Kathryn Tanner, David Fergusson, Kristen Deede Johnson, Charles Mathewes) and finds that, while some thinkers treat religious pluralism in general, Christian political theology tends to avoid direct and deep engagement with Islam. In order to correct this, he argues that political theology should be comparative theology, which is a kind of constructive theology based on analysis from multiple theological traditions that allows theologians to both better follow the reasoning of other traditions and to be challenged by them in the most sensitive areas of theological disagreement “with an irenic posture that seeks to learn from critiques and then rearticulate and explore fundamental theological claims in conversation with the other tradition” (36). For Ralston, the focus is on a comparative political theology of law, which involves bringing “Christian debates on the relationship between the law, the gospel, and the grounding of political authority into conversation with both classical Islamic critiques of Christianity and twentieth- and twenty-first-century Islamic debates on the relationship between sharīʿa, secularism (ʿalmānīya), and civil/state law (qānūn)” (38).

Rejecting both the conciliatory model of certain liberal Protestants and the confrontational model of John Milbank’s aspiration to Christian hegemony, Ralston proposes instead not to view Islam and sharīʿa as a theo-political threat (whether to a liberal or Christian public order) but to begin with the fact of unavoidable particularism in the world and to “engage with, listen to, learn from, and critique classic and contemporary Islamic debates in the hopes that a genuine theo-legal exchange might be possible” (89). This first requires that Christians appreciate the history of Muslim critiques of the Christian approach to law. These include the classical claims that Jews and Christians distorted their scriptures that were otherwise revealed authentically from God, and that the Christian conception of law does not include practical checks against tyranny and injustice. Modern Islamic critiques of Christianity tend to expand on its perceived social, economic, and political shortcomings compared to Islam, particularly the claim that Christianity is responsible for secular modernity’s separation of the spiritual and the material, the religious and the political, and the ethical and the legal. Ralston derives one very specific comparative theological conclusion here, which is that even when Christian theologians discuss law it remains abstract and concerned with principles rather than with the elaboration of concrete legal rules. Rather than responding defensively, Ralston suggests that this Islamic critique of Christianity could be used “as a prod and a challenge to Western Christians who have too easily capitulated to the categories of secular liberalism, especially around questions of public law and the market” (136).

Ralston thus turns to Karl Barth to ground a “Christological legal foundation” (chapter 5). For Barth, “the primary purpose of the law is not to accuse but to bear witness to the gospel” (215) and, pace the Muslim critics of Christianity, there is no political, legal, or social space free from divine command. And yet Ralston finds that while “Barth’s theology of the gospel and the law and his account of the civil and Christian communities together gesture toward a holistic vision” of law, “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” (245). Barth alone will not fill the missing piece in Christian theology where law should go. This is where Ralston argues that the Christian engagement with Islam and sharīʿa has value: such an engagement “highlights the need to reframe and rethink law as the central category for both Christian ethics and political theology” (245). Unlike Islamic approaches to law, treatments like Barth’s lack any real specificity or criteria for judgment in the actual public sphere. Ralston thus thinks that “Barth’s account of law would benefit from … a healthy dose of uṣūl al-fiqh, or the Islamic jurisprudential tradition of reasoning from divine revelation to the contextual demands of the law in a given place” (248).

Thus Ralston wants to move beyond Barth to center law in Christian theology. Such a turn to public law would, first, emphasize that law is at most a witness to Divine grace, and not a saving act of God in itself (262). Law does not lead to the time of God’s rule, but is the site for mediating contested and pluralist secular time through pursuing just legal frameworks and concrete legal judgments. But, second, this witness must be seen as at most indirect, and so this is not a call for a confessional state, like on the recently resurgent Catholic Integralist model. Public law on this vision is thus provisional, a kind of bridging between secular and soteriological temporalities.

How does this relate to Ralston’s efforts to put Christian theology of law into conversation with Islam and its more developed tradition of concrete jurisprudence? For one, Ralston holds that the Christian emphasis on provisionality and law as a witness in the time between revelation and salvation can be compared to the Islamic distinctions between the sharīʿa (as God’s law perfectly understood) and fiqh (as the human act of jurisprudence and interpretation), and the imperative of absolute sovereignty yet with the commitment to legal pluralism and the need to revisit legal rulings from the standpoint of human welfare and the objectives of the law. Both conceptions of law seem to hold a place for contingency, movement, becoming, and provisionality. With this in mind, Christians should adopt a more generous posture of pluralistic engagement whereby they abandon the view of sharīʿa as a single comprehensive entity and appreciate the ways that it includes within it practices of arguing about and reaching toward more just legal outcomes. This is a search (a “struggle” in the Islamic sense of ijtihād) that Christians can not only value and appreciate but perhaps share in. Christians may even emulate certain aspects of Islamic legal reasoning, issuing more concrete Christian fatwās rather than general statements of principle or natural law (321).

Ralston’s Law and the Rule of God is a very learned and sensitive exploration of the polemics around law and ethics on both the Christian and Islamic sides, an inquiry into the limits of Christian theologies of law, and an informed exploration of the transformation of Islamic law since the colonial period. His central conclusion is that in its form, methods, and scope, the Islamic legal tradition offers a kind of inspiration to Christians. Ralston is attracted to the way in which Islamic law is more concrete and jurisgenerative than are abstract theories of natural law or statements of ethical principle but also leaves space for active and future-oriented jurisprudence. He would like to see Christians engage on this terrain within their own tradition, thus producing more concrete forms of ethically informed legal rulings and to appreciate that there may be significant space for interfaith jurisprudence in pluralist societies that would evade secularism’s hegemonic exclusion of religion from public law.

In what sense though is this an “engagement” with the Islamic sharīʿa? “Engagement” is an elusive term, and perhaps we would do better to replace it more often with more specific and less ambiguous terms. This book engages in very little critical exploration of Islamic theology of law (uṣūl al-fiqh) from a comparative theological perspective, and so is not a concrete engagement in that sense. It also explores very little of the bodies of Islamic legal rulings from either a hermeneutic or ethical perspective, and so it is not a concrete engagement in that sense either. Instead, it is mostly a juxtaposition of various discourses in Islam and Christianity followed by a call for a kind of mimesis. While Ralston defends Christian theology against some of the more extreme Muslim claims that Christianity abandons law and public authority, his exploration of Islamic conceptions of law mostly serves to advance an argument that Christians would do better to have something like a Christian sharīʿa, mutatis mutandis.

Yet Christianity has a vibrant tradition of applied ethics, social gospels, understandings of justice, and political demands on public law. How would a more sharīʿa-like Christian discourse of law be different from these traditions? Moreover, what work does an encounter with sharīʿa do in exposing this lacuna? Did the example of Islamic law really generate the insight that Christianity could benefit from more applied jurisprudence? Couldn’t the same insight have been gleaned from, say, a comparative analysis of secular liberal and Christian contributions to the public sphere over the past few decades with a concern for how successful Christians have been at translating their witness into concrete proposals for just forms of law?

It may be that genuine “engagement” across traditions that rest on their own distinct textual authorities, dogmatic truth-claims, communal embodiments, and traditions of interpretation is something of a paradox. One can study the other and discuss points of mutual agreement and disagreement. But if engagement means something more like the possibility for interpenetration of views, methods, and insights, with the prospect for actual change and transformation, it would be good to know what the epistemic and psychological conditions for such engagement would be in the abstract. What is it about the bare knowledge of disagreement across theologies that generates the impulse toward transformation? The present study, while calling for greater Christian engagement with Islam and the sharīʿa, strikes me as having left some of the methodological and epistemic stakes in comparative theological engagement open for future exploration.