January 21 2015
These are the remarks I made at a Christian-Jewish dialogue-in-the-making in Jerusalem this week. Turned out to be somewhat tangential to our discussion, but I share them with you anyway.
What is the point of interfaith dialogue?
Over breakfast this morning, my wife Vivien gave me a one-sentence answer: “We are all searching for the real God.” I could stop there, but it would make for a short presentation.
My training is in history, so let me approach the question historically.
In 1948, from August 22 to September 4, the first assembly of the World Council of Churches was held in Amsterdam. Among the reports presented to the assembly was one entitled “The Christian Approach to the Jews”,[1] a title that may already start alarm bells ringing in Jewish ears.
The report, like the curate’s egg, is good in parts. No people in God’s one world has suffered more bitterly from our human disorder than the Jewish people, it says. “We cannot forget that we meet in a land [the Netherlands] from which 110,000 Jews were taken to be murdered” – one small part of the extermination of six million. It denounces antisemitism as absolutely irreconcilable with the Christian faith but admits that “too often we have failed to manifest Christian love towards our Jewish neighbours, or even a resolute will for common social justice.”
But the fulcrum on which the report turns is the gospel commission to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, and so it ends by recommending to member churches that they recover the universality of this commission by including the Jews in their evangelistic work and to the WCC that it give careful thought to how it can aid its churches in this aspect of their mission.
In receiving the statement, the assembly agreed with the American Baptist Benjamin Mays that it was imperative for the Jews “to be brought into full Christian fellowship here and now”.[2]
Almost seven decades later, this may seem to us merely perverse. Conversion to Christianity wouldn’t have saved the Jews of Europe, for Hitler defined Jewishness in racial and not religious terms. And it might well seem to hand Hitler a posthumous victory. As one of the preparatory documents put it, “the aim of general conversion cannot be anything less than the spiritual destruction of Judaism.[3] To which a Jew familiar with the New Testament might well have replied, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body…” (Matt 10.28)
To some in the assembly itself, the approach already seemed perverse. Hermann Heering of the Dutch Remonstrant Brotherhood asked for the whole report to be dropped: “… to all who had at heart the sufferings of the Jews it must seem impossible to preach to a people which had gone through so much. They must first be given an opportunity of living at all.”[4] But his was a minority view.
We’ve come a long way since then.
Amsterdam spoke about sharing with our Jewish neighbours the best that God has given us in Christ, which is understandable. If you have found “the pearl of great price and the treasure of heaven”, or think you have, you want your neighbours to find it too. But behind this desire lay also some rather dodgy theology: in Protestant terms, that we are justified, or saved, only by explicit faith in Jesus Christ; in Catholic and Orthodox terms, that there is no salvation outside the church.
Brian McLaren reports a conversation with his son that captures nicely what is wrong with this kind of thinking and why Christians today find it more and more impossible to support. His son was home from college for the holidays.[5]
‘I asked him how he was doing spiritually.
‘“I’m struggling, Dad,” he said.
‘“Tell me about that,” I said.
‘He replied, “Well, Dad, if Christianity is true, then nearly everyone I love is going to be tortured in the fires of hell forever. And if it’s not true, then life has no meaning.” He was silent for a moment and then added, “I just wish there were a better option.”’
In recent decades, we Christians have been finding better options.
Brian McLaren’s own journey shows us the road we’ve travelled in speeded-up form. McLaren was raised (as he puts it) “way out on the end of one of the most conservative twigs of one of the most conservative branches of one of the most conservative limbs of Christianity”.[6] So it’s not perhaps surprising that in 1998, when he published his first book, he described the mission of the church as “making more Christians and better Christians”:[7] Watch out, he’s coming for you.
Five years later he published a revised edition, called The Church on the Other Side, and the chapter on mission was the one he revised most.
He started by rewriting the mission of the church as “to be and to make disciples of Jesus Christ”. Since Christian can mean just about anything and disciple can’t, he felt this was a n improvement; but it was still horribly individualistic. So he added a phrase: “to be and to make disciples of Jesus Christ in authentic community”. But there was still something missing, so he added six more words: “to be and to make disciples of Jesus Christ in authentic community for the sake of the world”.[8]
And now we have something to talk about. For if the gospel isn’t “all about me”, with the church as a poor second, and the world somewhere off the radar screen, but rather about me in the church for the good of the world, we have an understanding of mission that is no longer threatening to others, because it’s no longer above stuffing the gospel down your ungrateful throats. Salvation is no longer exclusively or even primarily about what happens to us when we die but a lot about being saved from the pride, greed, ignorance and fear that stop us from being human beings and from the war, oppression, poverty or imprisonment that stop us living human lives. And we have a basis for dialogue, because now we can talk together about God and about God’s purposes for God’s one world.
What is the point of interfaith dialogue? First, to understand each other better and in so doing to understand ourselves better. Bernard Lonergan puts this in terms of encounter.
Encounter, he says, is meeting people, appreciating the values they represent, criticizing their defects, and allowing our living to be challenged at its very roots by their words and deeds. Encounter is the one way in which our self-understanding and horizon can be put to the test.[9]
But there is a further and higher point, and that is to learn together.
The best Christian thinking today is ecumenical: we no longer ask whether a Bible scholar or a church historian or a systematic theologian is Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox, we ask what if anything they have to say.
And that is obviously an advance on the days when the Church of Scotland thought that to be Christian was to be Presbyterian and Reformed and everyone else was going to burn in the fires of hell forever, especially if they were Anglicans. But it is still parochial.
Charles Davis draws on Wilfred Cantwell Smith to insist that Christian thinking today must be open to other religious traditions. For “the religious history of humankind is in plain historical fact a unity, insofar as the history of each religious tradition is intertwined with the history of the rest, so that the history of any one tradition is a strand in a more complex whole. Further… what is happening is the convergence of the various traditions, not towards a flat, homogenous unity of all religions, but toward the formation of a variegated, critical, global self-consciousness in which we can come together in communication and partnership, acknowledging the unity that binds us together despite the persistent plurality of our traditions.”[10]
To illustrate his point, I could speak from personal experience. As a student in New College, Edinburgh, forty years ago, I greatly profited from the writings of Geza Vermes on Jesus of Nazareth. On my way home from a visit to Jerusalem at Pentecost or Shavuot last year, I found a copy of Avraham Burg’s Very Near to You: Human Readings of the Torah, and since moving here, I’ve got hold of the Jewish Study Bible and the Jewish Annotated New Testament, all of which have been insinuating themselves subversively into my sermons and my sermon preparation. I also managed to refer to the Qur’an in speaking about John the Baptist to the Christian, Muslim, Jewish and secular students in our school in Tabeetha; but I know a lot less about Islam than the little I know about Judaism.
Or I could refer to Leo Dupree Sandgren’s 2010 book, Vines Intertwined. A History of Jews and Christians from the Babylonian Exile to the Advent of Islam, or to the recent writings of David Burrell: Faith and Freedom. An Interfaith Perspective; Knowing the Unknowable God. Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas; and Towards a Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology. Burrell in this last book has some interesting headings – “Respectfully Negotiating Outstanding Neuralgic Issues” and “Misuses and Abuses of Abrahamic Traditions”- that might provide food for future thought.
Or, since we’ve just mentioned an unknowable God, I could retell the story of the blind men and the elephant, itself an example of interfaith dialogue, since it exists in Jain, Buddhist, Sufi and Hindu versions and was introduced the West by John Godfrey Saxe.[11] Saxe points the moral of the story, as he sees it, in the following verse:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
We should try to avoid that, just as we should try to avoid the behaviour of the elephants in the inverted telling of the tale:
Six blind elephants were discussing what men were like. After arguing, they decided to find one and determine what it was like by direct experience. The first blind elephant felt the man and declared, ‘Men are flat.’ After the other blind elephants felt the man, they agreed.
What is the point of interfaith dialogue? We are all searching for the real God.
[1] The Theology of the Churches and the Jewish People. Statements by the World Council of Churches and its member churches (Geneva: WCC, 1988), 5-9.
[2] Ibid., 129.
[3] Ibid., 128.
[4] Ibid., 129.
[5] Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zonervan, 2004), 55f.
[6] Ibid., 40.
[7] Ibid., 116.
[8] Ibid., 116-118.
[9] Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: DLT, 1972), 247.
[10] Charles Davis, What is Living, What is Dead in Christianity Today? (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 1f.[11] “Blind men and an elephant”