- 56 Teeple, Howard M. The Mosaic Eschatological Prophet.

JBL Monograph
(1957).
, F. W. "Jesus the Prophet: A Re-Examination." JBL 68 (19^9), 285-299.
Young.

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5. THE RISEN PROPHET

Dr. Robert W. Jenson
The great stumbling blocks between Islam and the gospel have always been the assertions
the gospel makes and demands about Christ and those therewith made and demanded
about God: Christology and Trinitarianism. The task of this chapter is to envisage a
Christology and a Trinitarianism for the Islamic context, analogously to the way in which
our inherited doctrines developed and have their meaning within the context set for all
Western reflection by the Greeks. It is perhaps worth emphasizing at the beginning that
context does indeed make a difference: developed conceptual christological and trinitarian structures emerge as the messengers of the gospel respond to questions and challenges
that appear only historically, as the gospel penetrates differing religious cultures and
moves through differing historical periods.
It is this chapter's suggestion that faith's necessary affirmations about Christ can in the
Islamic context be made by calling him the "Risen Prophet." The biblical grounds and
controls of this title have been presented in previous chapters. Here its structure as a
christological title must first be noted. "Prophet" by itself is a description of the
historical Jesus as the earliest church remembered him. By itself, it does not affirm the
fact of this Jesus' resurrection, and is therefore not a true christological title, such as are
thosee.g., "Son" or "Lord"which quickly came to dominate the discourse of the early
church; these all refer at once to the historical reality of Jesus and to his reality as the
now risen one. The two-word phrase "Risen Prophet," however, can be a true christological title because it has this double reference; two words are needed, to be sure, but this is
a small inconvenience to pay in order to recover, for a Christology in Islamic context, the
significance of Jesus' prophetic actuality.
Within the history of Western Christianity, the truth of christological assertions has been
conceptually accommodated by the body of discourse about God customarily called "the
doctrine of the Trinity." We may assume that a Christology of the Risen Prophet will
require analogous accommodation, that a Christian theology for Islamic context will
come to include some body of discourse that functions in a way much like the way of
Western Christianity's Trinity doctrine.

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Christology

Christians concerned for that context need to rethink their theology for it; the following
suggestions are offered primarily to these.

We can begin our chi istological reflection with existing agreement between Islam and the
gospel. According to both, it is characteristic of the true Godin the language of Islam it
is God's sunnato have prophets. According to both, Jesus was and now is a prophet.
Indeed, according to Islam, Jesus, as the Messiah, is also that historically special sort of
messenger from God called a rasul. (We should note here that the distinction between nabl"
and rasul is not usually maintained terminologically in later Islam, but is strict in the
Qur'an and is materially maintained also later. Perhaps the most usual modern interpretation is that every rasul is a prophet but not every prophet is a rasul.)
It is the biblical prophets that make the defining class for both religions. Schematizing
drastically, a prophet in the Bible is one given to speak promises and threats that are
God's promises and threats, and that are God's because his Spirit is on the speaker. That
Jesus was and is a prophet is unquestioned in Islam, as is the prophets' inspiration by the
Spirit, however differently the Spirit may be conceived. Nor do Christians have reason to
bridle at this classification; that Jesus is a prophet is clear also through the New
Testament, and much of the christological language we tend to read as unconnected to
this role should in fact be understood against the background of prophecy's role in Israel.
Moreover, the Spirit that descends on Jesus and which he in turn gives, remains explicitly
the "Spirit that spoke by the prophets."
In this chapter we make the experiment of leaving the christological descriptions at that:
Jesus is a prophet, who, possessed by and bestowing the Spirit, proclaimed the imminent
Kingdom. Then the offense will be where it always belongs, for Islam as for all: in the
proclamation of this prophet's death and resurrection. Our question is: what, within an
Islamic context, would be good about this news, supposing it is true? The news itself is an
offense to Islam, by its insistence that Jesus, a rasul, experienced death; but the gospel is
analogously offensive everywhere, and that offense neither can nor dare be mitigated.
The question just posed cannot, of course, finally be answered by outsiders. Those who
thought through the gospel within the Greek context were not unhyphenated "Christians"
merely adapting to Greek modes of thought; they were Greeks who had come to believe
and were struggling to understand this new situation. If there is to be a Muslim version of
the gospel, it must be discovered by those who live in that context. But also Western

In the theological project here attempted, we begin precisely with the offense, as
Christian theology must always begin. It was, according to the Qur'an, just because Jesus
as prophet was so close to God that his community inevitably set out to kill him. This is
the exact truth by Christian lights. Moreover, it is deeply embedded in Muslim piety that
the prophets are not only persecuted but that the persecution sometimes, in its own
terms, succeeds. And again, the memory of martyrs is a recurrent wellspring of Muslim
devotion. But although it would surely be on the tip of Muslim tongues to remember Jesus
in just this way, the other conviction intervenes: as the Messiah, as a rasul, Jesus must
manifest God's triumph; he could not have been allowed by God to be defeated. Thus
Islam's conviction that Jesus now lives as both prophet and rasul, isat least in the
dominant traditionmaintained by the teaching that he did not in fact die.
There is surely an antinomy here. A rasul may be a prophet, but the rasul's identification
with God's cause deprives him of the ability to suffer. Thus it deprives him of that
prophetic identification with the fate in this world of God's muslim, which so deeply
touches Islamic experience. We suggest that faith's necessary specific claim about Jesus,
its assertion of "atonement" in him, can in Islamic context be compendiously stated so:
resurrection is the particular way this particular rasul has life, God does not triumph in
this one of his messengers by keeping him from death but by overcoming his death. Thus
Jesus is the one who, as killed and risen, can be rasul and yet fully prophet, fully
participant in the fate of God's word in this world. Because Jesus is risen, there is one who
perfectly fulfills Islam's passion for a message from God, one in whom the antinomy of
that passion is overcome.
We do not propose this statement of the christological claim because we suppose it will be
more acceptable to Muslims; doubtless it will not be. We suggest rather that this is simply
the true way to make the claim in Islamic context; there is one prophet who, as rasul in his
particular way, is the Risen Prophet. From the claim, two soteriological lines open.
The one has already appeared and needs little further discussion. In Islam, the central
soteriological category is prophecy. To obey a prophet is to be right with reality. If the
crucified prophet Jesus is risen, then there is now one prophet whose word is fully engaged

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with our actual Jives and world. He not only proclaims God's word, but has followed that
word to its fate in this world, "even unto death." In Islamic tradition, other prophets have
suffered, but just so they have vanished into the past. The risen Jesus is such a martyred
prophet, who nevertheless now lives.

The following suggestions, let us repeat, are not proposed as a direct message to Islam,
but as theology for the Christian church, as it lives and indeed proclaims its gospel in
Islam's world. With that warning, we suggest that the gospel about prophecy may be
summarized as follows. God has established one living prophet whose death is nevertheless behind and not before him and who therefore is permanent among the prophets. His
prophecy has its final form, yet its finality in no way infringes God's freedom, for its
content is precisely God's freedom from this world's judgments, and its liveliness is
established by the definitive act of God's freedomalso for Islamhis raising of the
dead. Therefore there is a criterion of right prophecy: agreement with his. There are
reliable expectations of our position under God's prophets. Moreover, these expectations
may be of good, because the prophet with whom all prophecy coheres is for us unto death.
That prophecy is thus true and good is the gospel's good news, in Islamic context. Is this
the whole gospel? Yes, in this specific context.

The other requires more development. That Jesus the prophet was killed, and for the
content of his prophesying, would in Islamic context mean at least the following. First, in
his fate the opposition between God's judgment over his creatures and their judgment
over God and themselves is again enacted. It is the prophet crucified by his community
whom God makes the norm of prophecy. Thus God's triumph in this messenger must be in
utter freedom over against all the judgments of this world. Second, the prophet Jesus was
utterly faithful to his sending to us. Nothing could turn him from us. Third, this prophet's
prophecy has its definitive form; he has prophesied to the end. Insofar as God's word is
brought by this prophet, we know what that word is.
Now what if this prophet is risen? We suggest: then he is the possibility of all prophecy.
That is, because there is this prophet there can be true prophets, and because there is this
prophet it is good that there are true prophets. That is, he is the giver of the Spirit. Let us
unpack this set of conclusions.
Muhammad, being the only claimant in his time and place, did not encounter the problem
of false prophecy, except as he himself accused of it. Over against pagan scoffers, he
simply asserted the fact of his inspiration. But over against Jewish and Christian critics,
he instanced the coherence of his prophecy with that which they already believed. And
that is, of course, both the right criterion of prophecy's truth, and the great problem. For
why should new prophecy cohere with old, even in fundamentals, if God is as free as the
Bible and Muhammad both say he is? Why should not God, having once, for example, made
"faith" the criterion of the judgmentas Paul and Muhammad agree he haschange his
mind? Why should he not later add other conditions, retroactively depriving earlier
generations of their hope? Again, why should the enormous amendments and repentances
in the course of Israelite prophecy not be taken as incoherence? And if such uncertainties
are possible, then even supposing that some or all of the prophets are truly sent by God,
how can it be good that God submits us to their arbitrary, ultimately disorienting
deliverances?

Trinitarianism
Our next assignment is more problematic. Islam has seen Christian Trinitarianism as our
great fall, from the faith of Abraham into the primal sin of shirk, the "associating" with
God of an other than God. The attempt to interpret God's triune reality in Islamic context
is, therefore, the standing or falling point of any attempt to think through the faith's
mission in and for Islam. The effort must function in at least three ways.
One function is apologetic. Christians do not intend trinitarian doctrine as shirk; we are
as insistent as Muhammad that God is one and only. If renewed reflection, specifically for
an Islamic context, can make that plainer than we have evidently been able so far to make
it, better mutual understanding may be possible. We should remember that our inherited
body of trinitarian reflection represents the historical self-assertion of the biblical
identification of God within the Greek context, and its critical purification in that
struggle. Ripped from this context and simply recited in the very different Islamic
context, inherited trinitarian slogans, for example, about "preexistence" or "three persons," may very well in fact work out as shirk.
We are led to a second function: the reformation of Christian doctrine. What most
Christians actually have in mind as "the doctrine of the Trinity" is not in fact the historic
teaching, but one of the heresies it was intended to overcome; and about these last,

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Muslim objections are fully justified. The historic doctrine of Triunity was created
precisely to overcome Christian lapses into the shirk that characterized ancient Western
paganism. It was Athanasius's chief accusation against the Arians: ". . . like the Greeks
you lump creature and Creator together" (To Serapion, 1:30). But most modern Christians
nevertheless suppose that Trinitarianism is indeed a matter of assimilating Jesus as
closely as possible to Godthat is to say, that it is a piece of shirk. In bad conscience
about this, many modern Christians slack off the christological assertionsthereby only
relapsing into the real shirk of one of the old heresies. Perhaps the attempt to deal with
Muslim criticism may help cure us of this absentmindedness.

so that we must then ask how to rank Christ over against him. God is God as, and only as,
the Father of this Son and the Son of the Father, and the Spirit of both. God, it is said by
the creed, is not to be understood as in any way "above" or "behind" what happens with his
messenger; no metaphysical space is to be supposed through which Christ should be
"associated" to him.

And third, Christianity's Trinitarianism is its repertoire of devices by which it identifies

God, by which it answers the chief religious question: which God do you worship as the
true God? Christians have answered: the one to whose very reality Jesus' resurrection
belongs, the one whose proper name can therefore be "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." Thus
our attempt to construct trinitarian doctrine for Islamic context will be a chief arena in
which a fundamental question can be dealt with: do we and Islam worship the same God? Is
our relation to Islam more like our relation to Judaism or more like our relation to, for
example, Vedic religion?
We must begin with what may be called the trinitarian move. The primal Christian given
is not the developed doctrine of the Trinity, as this emerged in centuries of confrontation
between the gospel and Greek ways of thinking about God. The Christian givens are the
trinitarian proper name for God, "Father, Son, and Spirit," and an accompanying simple
but drastic reorientation of perception. It is the latter that is here our concern. God,
according to the gospel, is not the distant unrevealed one, to whom his agency and
revelation in this world must be in a second place related; God in himself and from himself
is precisely the one who "raised Jesus from the dead"; God's singularity and omnipotent
rule are constituted in the events of his agency among and revelation to his creatures.
In the specific history of Western Christianity, the trinitarian move was decisively made
by Nicea's assertion that Christ is homoousios, "of one being," with "the Father." This was
precisely the contradiction of what (shirk-infiltrated) "Arians" supposed, that Christ
must be very like, perhaps altogether like, God. The Nicene assertion that Christ is
homoousios in God is not, indeed, primarily an assertion about Christ at all, but about God
as such and only so about Christ. God, the fathers of Nicea said, is not simply the Father,

God is Christ's "Father"; he is not antecedently in himself unpaternal, to become such by

acquiring a Sonthe very piece of shirk Muhammad suspectedbut is constituted just in
his eternal uniqueness and singularity by being the Father of Christ. Again, God is this
"Father's" Son; he is not antecedently in himself unsent and unobedient, needing an
associate to be sent and obey if a messenger is neededwhich would be another piece of
shirkbut is constituted in his own eternal uniqueness and simplicity by being the one
sent by and obedient to a Father. And again, God is the mutual Spirit of the "Father" and
Jesus; he is not antecedently in himself static, to acquire a future and community by
creating a churchshirk againbut is constituted in his own sole deity by being the
future of the community he is in himself. In general, what happens with Christ, the
"relations" posited in the history among Jesus and his "Father" and their "Spirit," is not
adventitious to the life of unique and sole deity; it is that life. Any less drastic assertion,
as the church at and after Nicea came gradually to see, must either so dissociate God and
what happens with Jesus as to rob the latter of all salvific certainty, or leave us with the
necessity to associate, to liken, Jesus to God after the factwith the necessity to
commit shirk.
So far the way in which the trinitarian move was made in Western Christianity's context.
Our chief problem can now be posed: how would the trinitarian move be made in Islamic
context? We propose that it is to be made by the question: prophecy may be essential for
us, but is it for God? Alternatively: the rasul who suffered may thereby be irrevocably
determined to prophetic identification with us; but what reality has this "compassion"
to use the Qur'an's wordin and for God himself? Even if the total prophetic revelation
may around Christ cohere in itself, and be true relatively to our creaturely condition, may
not God be different for and in himself? Would not the only fully reliable knowledge of
God be one that transcended prophecy, also as it coheres in Christ or is sealed in
Muhammad, and knew God not as he appears to prophets but as he appears in himself? And
positing that difference, might it not be that should we in mystic experience or at the

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Last Day encounter God in himself, we should find him not, for central example, "allcompassionate?" Is the spirit of the prophets necessarily God's own Spirit?

antagonistic context, challenging the gospel by an incompatible interpretation of God.

Islam has historically been flatly antagonistic to the church's existing trinitarian doctrine, but we may nevertheless judge that the way in whichat leastthe Qur'an speaks
of God does not in fact interpret his reality incompatibly with trinitarian insight. It
appears to be possible to make the essential trinitarian move, for Islamic context,
without contradicting any necessary tenet of Islam, save only its existing dissent from the
gospel claim itself, that Jesus is crucified and risen.

It is the biblical and qur'anic messages themselves that pose the question just unfolded, by
their assertion of God's utter freedom. But is has been quite other interpretations of God,
encountered in the Christian as in the Muslim mission, that historically have pressed for
answers dissociating God in himself from God in his revelation. In the tradition of Western
Christianity, it was the Greek interpretation of deity as sheer atemporality, that
demanded distance between God in himself and all temporal events, including Christ. The
Nicene decision was a major victory over this pressure, a victory by biblical faith's answer
to its own question. It is important to note that also Islam has faced similar pressure: in
controversy with Mu'tazilite proposals, Islam asked whether the Qur'an is created or
uncreated, and answered that it is uncreated. It would seem to follow that the reality of
prophecy belongs not only to our relation to God but to God himself, unwillingly though
Islam might concede the implication.
Now, if we say that the message of prophecy is uncreated, and if we say that all prophecy
coheres around and is guaranteed by the Risen Prophet, just those two assertions together
make the whole trinitarian move in an Islamic context. The word God speaks to us by his
prophets, cohering and guaranteed by the Risen Prophet, and the Spirit by which prophecy
is informed, are the word God speaks to himself to be the one personal living God and the
Spirit that is that life. In the mere logic of the case, no more need be said: apart from
specific historically encountered problems, the foregoing paragraph would be a complete
doctrine of Triunity for Islamic context.
The developed doctrine of the Trinity in the existing Christian tradition depends on
additional factors: the need and opportunity to conduct theology in the analytical
categories made available by Greek reflection, and therewith the continuing pressure of
the antagonistic Greek interpretation of God. Analogous factors will doubtless appear
also in the Islamic context, but the history which trinitarian reflection may thus make
cannot be predicted from the outside.
We do seem to have sufficient grounds to make a necessary decision: whether Islam is or is
not the same sort of context for trinitarian discourse and reflection as Hellenism has been
for our tradition. The religion and reflection of Greek Western antiquity have been an

Perhaps, therefore, we should expect a doctrine of Triunity for Islamic context to be less
tortured, but also less speculatively creative, than has been the developed doctrine of the
Western church. Perhaps the Islamic context is more like that of the New Testament
church itself, in which a trinitarian discourse could flourish that was more a liturgical
rhetoric and logic than a metaphysical construction, and was in large part unselfconscious. If this is so, it would be a blunder to impose in such a context the formulas of
our developed trinitarian constructions. Let trinitarian faith in Islamic context affirm
that the prophet Jesus is risen, to be the giver of the Spirit to other prophets and to us, and
that the message and spirit of the prophets are God's word to himself and the Spirit of his
own life, and let faith carry on homiletically and liturgically from there.
On the other hand, of course, Islam has almost as long and intimate a history with Greek
reflection as does the West. Perhaps, therefore, a Trinitarianism in Islamic context would
also be led to use the powerful and dangerous analytical tools the Greeks created.
Probably even such a development would not proceed exactly as it has among us, since
Islamic Hellenism has been its own enterprise. In 13th-century Christian hands, Averroes
and Avicenna were a disaster for trinitarian faith, but in Muslim hands they might for all
we know enable splendid trinitarian insight.
Insofar as a doctrine of Triunity in more developed form may emerge in Islamic context,
its categories and axioms cannot be predicted in advance. We can perhaps point, at some
random, to Islamic phenomena that may prove significant. First, the prophetic message is
indeed said to be uncreated. Second, it is essential to Muslim prayer that God can be
entreated mercifully to intercede with himself. Third, it is noteworthy that in the great
confession of "God the compassionate, the merciful," both adjectives are from the same
root; the distinction is between a quality of nature and a quality of action; we might
translate, "God the merciful in himself and the merciful in action." Thus God's nature and

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action are distinguished, but then the action is made to define the naturewhich is
exactly a trinitarian sort of move. And finally, in the Qur'an, the only limit to God's
freedom is his own mercy self-imposed as restraint.

we judge the same about, for example, John the Seer or Danielwho are, after all, in the
Bible. Within this chapter we perhaps should limit ourselves to saying that there appears
to be no necessary conflict between the trinitarian identification of God and the claim
that Muhammad was this God's prophet. Again, such an acknowledgment will not satisfy
Muslims, but it could establish discourse on a less antagonistic beginning.

The questionor perhaps even antinomyposed by these phenomena is how seriously

they are or can be taken as truth about and for God. If there is a crucified and risen
prophet, that question is driven to decision, in reference to him.
Afterword
One function of the trinitarian project just described must be taken up for itself. The
question was asked: do Muslims and Christians identify the same God? It must be insisted
that this is a genuine question. There is surely only one God, and we may well suppose that
he receives all prayers, however addressed or misaddressed. But from this it in no way
follows that we all, in our various religions, worship the same God. Quite manifestly, we
do not. And the Bible, anyway, is clear: there is the Lord, and there are the Baalim and
Asherah, and to worship the Lord means to choose.
The church is the community of the baptized, of those who have renounced "the devil and
all his ways." The "ways" denoted wereand where applicable, arethe pagan religions.
Jews made and make no such renunciation if they are baptized. At various times, Muslims
who have come to Baptism have been required to renounce their previous faith. Our
question may be formulated: was this requirement correct? If the preceding section is
true, the requirement was not correct. It is surely the gospel's mandate to baptize Jews
who are brought to ask for it, but we do not regard them, as we do pagans, as thereby first
beginning to worship the true God. In our judgment the church's relation to Islam must in
this respect be like its relation to Judaism.
Implied in this judgment is a judgment about the Qur'an, about Muhammad's claim to be a
prophet. It is hard to know exactly what is involved in even asking, "Was Muhammad really
a prophet?" But the church did not initially suppose that Jesus' special position meant
there would be no further prophets; and for centuries the appearance of prophets was an
expected phenomenon in the church. There seems to be no a priori reason why Christians
must deny that God could have sent Muhammad as a prophet to the Arabs. We may indeed
be compelled to judge that Muhammad's prophecy is inadequate in one way or another, but

At the end of this chapter we must repeat: none of its suggestions are intended as a readymade gospel for Islam. What can be suggested is a line of reflection that Christians who
are called to minister in Islam, and so to think in that context, may test. Is it apologetically helpful? Does it appropriately criticize and extend our own understanding of the
gospel? Is its treatment of God's identity correct?