After having read Nostra Aetate, which had such a conciliar tone in talking about other faiths, particularly the monotheistic ones, it was a bit of a suprise to examine the implications of the Regensburg address on interreligious dialogue. Benedict XVI presented Islam as a faith with a severely deficient understanding of God that did not allow for the possibility of human relation with God–even through analogy– and which collapses into Theistic voluntarism, which is ultimately irreconcilable with Orthodox Christian belief. The implications of Muslims having such a belief about God would thus appear to go against the notion outlined in Nostra Aetate that Muslims worship and adore the same God. Benedict would contend: How would Muslims worship the same God if their conception of God is of one who is so radically distant?
Indeed it would appear that the sentiments expressed in Nostra Aetate, in order to be true, would need to excise all hellenistic influence which maintains that faith must be married to reason, which is the very thing that Benedict XVI argued against in the Regensburg Address. Is a belief about the nearness of God a necessary criterion for belieiving that we worship the same God? And is a belief in a voluntaristic God tantamount to dehellenization?
Paul Elhallal 
I like your observation, Paul. Your questions are also relevant and looking forward to hear more about them. Interconnectedness between faith and reason is, undoubtedly crucial in Christian theology and I like the way Pope Benedict XVI employs it. I am curious to learn more on this subject.
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Thanks for this, Paul. Hm. Upon my first read, I didn’t take Benedict XVI to be saying all that much about Islam himself, but rather just setting up a question for his reflection. Of course, his choice of the text or the quotes that he pulled to set this up could be read with further implications, and perhaps these should have been considered more carefully. The larger point that you raise is an interesting one that gets us back to the discussions we had around Volf’s book. What is Nostra Aetate saying when it declares that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Would it be helpful in a document like this to introduce the objective/subjective perspectives that John brought up to nuance this statement? (With that distinction, Benedict XVI could say that he is simply speaking about our differing conceptions of the one God without making a claim about whether or not we objectively worship the same God.) Is a document like Nostra Aetate not the place for theological fine-tuning like that? Dupuis mentioned a few times that the conciliar documents remained vague as if this were a bad thing. I wondered if that was intentional, in order to allow for interpretive space and for the conversation to continue.
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I think (@ Tyler) that it was intentional. I have the sense that Dupuis was saying “look the Church has not come to one clear teaching on this so I still have room to navigate.” As for Benedict, I agree with you (@ Paul) that he oversimplifies things in Islam by point to its voluntarism. There were more rational trends in Islam (and there still are in Shi`ism and some reform currents) but imho Benedict is actually not far off in his portrait since the dominant trends of Islamic theology for the last few centuries (that is Ash`ari) are more or less voluntarist.
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