The first two theologians treated in this chapter – Robert Jenson and Eberhard Jüngel – were conditioned by both a deep-lying attraction to revisionary metaphysics and by eschatology in their reception of Barth’s theology. This helped to uncover aspects of Barth’s dogmatics that had previously gone unnoticed. Ultimately, however, the temptation for both Jenson and Jüngel was to treat the immanent Trinity as something that is “complete” only in the eschaton. For divine kenosis, this meant that it was not an ontological precondition to incarnation but something that takes place in Jesus’ way to the cross. The third theologian treated in this chapter is Piet Schoonenberg. He shares a starting point with Jenson and Jüngel in the narrated history of Jesus of Nazareth attested in the New Testament, yet the “principles” he employs in his constructive Christology could just as easily be taken in a direction in which the second person of the Trinity is not collapsed into a human being. This chapter’s historical analysis finally raises the questions: why resist a collapse of the eternal Son into Jesus of Nazareth? Why engage in any sort of return to the received Christological dogma, however modified we might make it to be?

This final chapter outlines the contours of a Christian political theology of law as an indirect and provisional witness to the divine rule, before considering how this approach might engage with Sunni political theology. The chapter develops a theological account of public law as a site of contestation where provisional and indirect witness to God’s rule is at stake. The law is a witness because it is never able to be or to usher in the rule of God; it is indirect because public law should be minimally concerned with the truth about God’s identity and nature; it is provisional since the law is always in need of critique and reevaluation and can never be finally settled. Following the comparative hermeneutic that has guided this book, the chapter then shows how such a theo-legal vision might engage with certain aspects of classical, modern, and contemporary Sunni Islamic thought and prove a productive framework for further debate and dialogue on three key issues in modern Islamic thought: (1) the nature of divine sovereignty and public law, (2) the distinctions between sharī’a and fiqh, and (3) the relationship between maqaṣid (the higher aims of the law), maṣlaḥa, and fiqh.