By using a medieval Byzantine Emperor in the C14th he raised an issue that still exists and there has been a failure to confront Islam on an intellectual basis. “Is violence justified on grounds of religious purpose? “. The Emperor was able to engage his Muslim interlocutor by appealing to a shared, natural human reason and its ability to apprehend the truths of God.

As the Pope summarized, the Emperor was able to articulate “the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.” He continued: “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. …… The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”

The internal problem for Muslims is that some Muslims say that there is no relation between Islam and violence while others do claim that violence is used to foster their cause. It has been suggested that 15- 25 % of the total Muslim world population support the notion of the legitimacy of violence both in principle and in the Koran. It is not enough to repeat endlessly that Islam is a religion of peace while not explaining the the violence that comes from the depth of their faith.

It’s true that we cannot “finally predict if and how Islam will adjust to, say, historical-critical scholarship or political liberalism.“ (The Pope’s) ’option’ (vis a vis his address at Regensburg) in favor of inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue between the Muslim world and the Western. is unequivocal.

Dialogue is not an option but a vital necessity and Benedict took a stab at laying it out for them how this can be accomplished. In other words, he invited them to ‘start talking.’

Most Muslims have nothing but contempt for Christianity. Most Christians regard Islam as an inferior religion–both primitive and barbaric. If angels flew over the earth and one religion or the other disappeared, adherents of the surviving religion would think it is so much the better for humanity.

We have to look at each religion as it is rather than how we want it to be.

Bulliet contends that Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis and “Islamophobia” are obscuring the common heritage that Christians and Muslims share. Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, he says, have impinged upon one another and influenced each other for centuries and cannot be understood in isolation from one another; an adversarial relationship is not a constant of history and is unnecessary today.

Bulliet, like so many other followers of Edward Said, condemns those who hold that a clash of civilizations is upon us for pronouncing “against Islam the same self-righteous and unequivocal sentence of ‘otherness’ that American Protestants once visited upon Catholics and Jews.”

There is a fundamental inconsistency at the heart of this work: Bulliet recommends that instead of trying to bring Western values to the Islamic world, Westerners should cultivate respect for Islamic values. Then he confidently predicts that the coming decades will see new democracies flowering all over the Islamic world, without considering in any depth the fact that significant numbers of Muslims see democracy itself as a Western import, alien to Islam and unwelcome as a replacement for Shari‘a law.

Bulliet’s confidence that secularism will ultimately take root in the Islamic world despite its failure to do so up to now is rooted in his contention that Islam will eventually go through the same stages of development as did the Judeo-Christian tradition. In attempting to make his case, however, he hastily and superficially glosses over significant differences between the traditions—particularly the absence of a secular/sacred distinction within Islamic tradition. Likewise, he ignores or dismisses as “Islamophobic” analyses of just how deeply rooted within Islamic history and thought is a contempt for and adversarial relationship with non-Muslim traditions and cultures. Yet if his irenic vision is to become reality, Muslim reformers will have to acknowledge and confront these aspects of Islamic tradition, not deny or downplay their existence.

I don’t really think it is a theological term, but if it is, it’s a Christian theological term. Jews certainly don’t see Christianity as the full flowering of Judaism.

Wikipedia has two statements that seem very relevant to me:

Promoting the concept of America as a Judeo-Christian nation became a political program in the 1920s, in response to the growth of anti-Semitism in America. The rise of Hitler in the 1930s led concerned Protestants, Catholics, and Jews to take active steps to increase understanding and tolerance.

and

The term became especially significant in American politics, and usage of the term “Judeo-Christian values” grew in the so-called culture wars, of the 1990s.

It seems to me that when Paul Ryan speaks of “Judeo-Christian values,” what he is really talking about is conservative Christian values, not values Jews and Christians share in common. Obama got somewhere around 70% to 75% of the Jewish vote in 2008, and while he may have slipped somewhat, it will still be stunning if Obama does not get significantly over 50% of the Jewish vote tomorrow. Apparently most Jews don’t think Obama is a threat to “Judeo-Christian values.”