I thought that the evaluation that D’Costa wrote of Volf’s argument was rather fair, though flawed. D’Costa did well to commend the clarity of Volf’s argument and acknowledged that Volf’s argument was well-supported. At the same time, I thought that his critiques of Volf appeared to engage with what might be inferred from Volf’s argument, not what his argument actually entails.
Consider the following:
“I think Volf emphasizes commonality because of a possible category mistake. He seems to assume that, if we do not admit that Muslims worship the same God as Christians, we are doomed to tension and hostility. Believing in the same God is the only route to working together peacefully and freely. This is a precarious argument. The history of Judaism and Christianity shows otherwise. Furthermore, an unintended but serious implication would mean there can be no social peace or cooperation between monotheists and non-theists, because they do not believe in the same God. This is historically false and theoretically problematic. If Volf actually means that a shared monotheism is the best route to harmony, rather than the only route, that still requires a lot more argument.” (D’Costa 156)
D’Costa here makes an inference about Volf’s argument that Volf himself did not make. Volf does not assert that “believing in the same God is the only route to working together peacefully and freely”, though he did argue that believing in the same God would be a route to working together peacefully and freely. This is illustrative of the kinds of mistakes that D’Costa made. Volf, in making a positive claim such as this, does not necessarily intend to assert that its opposite is not valid or true. This is where D’Costa misses the mark in his review.
Paul Elhallal 
Thanks for this, Paul – I agree with you. Though I find elements of D’Costa’s critique useful, I think you are right that here he perhaps turns Volf’s offer of a possibility into an insistence on a requirement. Tyler and Sister agree with you, I think, that Volf is trying to open up new possibilities in dialogue rather than insist on one trajectory. It could be that my stress in today’s blog post on starting from the points of difficulty and disagreement, in which I would perhaps go further than D’Costa does, may be misplaced if it closes down a conversation. Both authors seem to be looking for a way to keep conversation open without shying away from the thornier issues of doctrine and history; perhaps Volf emphasizes the former and D’Costa the latter.
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