Are its teachings fixed and final, or open to new understanding?

The revelation is final — Muhammad ﷺ is the last prophet (Qur'an 33:40) and the religion is complete (Qur'an 5:3). Human understanding of it can be corrected; the revelation itself cannot be revised.

Nothing is fixed or final: every conclusion, including atheism itself, stays open to revision if new evidence arrives. Atheist thinkers count this openness a strength — authority here is evidential, never settled by decree.

Nothing is final — the method applies to itself. Every agnostic conclusion, including the suspension of judgement about God, stands ready to be revised the day the evidence changes.

The core is fixed — 'the faith once for all delivered to the saints' (Jude 3), summarized in the creeds — while understanding grows: Newman argued that true doctrine develops like a living idea, and Protestants speak of a church 'always being reformed' by Scripture.

The Torah itself is held final — Maimonides' principles say no other Torah will replace it — yet its interpretation is deliberately open: the Talmud preserves its disputes and rules that 'these and those are the words of the living God.' Orthodoxy develops law within received rules; Reform treats even the law as revisable.

The Dhamma itself is held to be timeless — the Buddha discovered a law he did not create, and appointed no successor: the teaching is the teacher. But understanding unfolds: the Mahayana added whole bodies of sutras it regards as deeper turnings of the same wheel, which the Theravada does not accept.

The shruti itself is held to be eternal and unchanging, but understanding of it has always been open: new commentaries, new schools, and new smriti texts reinterpreted it for each era. The tradition even teaches that dharma's demands differ from age to age (yuga-dharma) — a principle reformers have used to argue for change from within.

The scripture is closed and final: nothing has been added since 1708, and no living person may claim the Guru's seat. Interpretation and communal rules, however, are living matters, settled by the congregation and institutions such as the Akal Takht.

Open by design. Its arrangements are ordinary law — the French statute of 1905 has been amended, court doctrines shift — while the core principle, equal citizenship without religious coercion, is defended by its advocates as a durable achievement, not a revealed truth.

Explicitly open. The manifestos call themselves statements of their generation, not creeds; humanists rewrote them twice (1973, 2003) and present that revisability as a strength, not a weakness.

Open by design — everything may be re-argued, and constitutions may be amended. Yet one commitment functions as fixed: the equal liberty of persons itself, which liberals defend rather than put to the vote.

Open by design: there is no creed to close. Each generation has revised the last — the second wave faulted the first's narrowness, intersectionality faulted the second's — and feminists count this self-correction a strength.

Open — there is no fixed creed. Every generation redefines the nation, and the doctrine itself has civic, ethnic, liberal, religious, and populist readings; Renan's point was precisely that the nation must be re-chosen daily.