The other day, I shared a link on Facebook to an article Jesus: the Muslim prophet. The article was published five years ago and recently reshared on Facebook. It reflects thoughts that have been around for a long time.

I was hoping to get some of my Christian and Muslim friends to join in a discussion about this. Recently, I had been in a discussion where a Christian friend spoke about her difficulty reading the Quran. Remembering an old saying from evangelical Christian circles that “believers are the only Bible non-believers read”, I mentioned that I was learning the most about the Quran from posts that my Muslim friends shared talking about their lives and relating it back to the Quran.

Yet the first response to this post was from an atheist Jew saying, “It's all pretty amusing as only a story that has seen the deaths of millions can be”. It wasn’t a great start to an interfaith dialog.

Yet we did get to a point of discussing Unitarianism and Trinitarianism, and hints of Universalism which was something, given the number of atheists in the discussion. One at point, one of the atheists asked, “how could anyone working within your doctrine control anyone else's behavior if it wasn't the one, real, chosen doctrine?”

This raises an interesting question: What is the purpose of theology? Is it to control others? Something else? How do we approach inter-faith discussions about theology? Where is there common ground? How can theology be used to help make the world a better place?