In July 2008, Christianity Today magazine's chief editor, David Neff, attended the "Loving God and Neighbor Together" dialogue between Muslims and Christians held at Yale University. While there, he noticed a critical difference between the Christian and Muslim understandings of love, compassion, and mercy. He writes:

The Christian participants had been taught by Jesus that love should be indiscriminate—just as the mercy shown by the Good Samaritan was conditioned on nothing other than the wounded man's need. That may not be the way we generally behave, but it is the way we have learned to think of ourselves. It is the standard against which we measure ourselves.

The Muslim participants startled us Christians by talking about the limits their religion brought to their compassion. Orphans, widows, and others in need through no fault of their own deserve compassion, they said. But in Islamic ethics, there was no obligation to help the person whose drunkenness or gambling or otherwise unwise behavior put them in difficulty.

Reflecting on what I heard those Muslim leaders say, the tension was not between a generous God and a stingy God, as [Japanese theologian] Kosuke Koyama puts it, but between mercy that was defined and conditioned by justice (the Muslim view) and justice that was conditioned and defined by mercy (the Christian view).