A great documentary on Christian/Muslim relations airs today. Check here for stations:http://www.ethicsdaily.com/photos/airdates.pdf
Americans don’t have a history of people within the Christian faith killing each other, as Europe saw for centuries and Northern Ireland has seen until recently, but we do have plenty of experience with Christians denigrating the faith, culture, and beliefs of other Christians. With so much conflict, misunderstanding, and genuine bad feeling between Christians, it should not be surprising that when we consider Christian responses to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of other faiths, we often find those same emotions heightened to a greater degree. Admittedly, sometimes they are returned. Not everyone from another tradition is going to be willing to sit down and talk, and I don’t imagine that we can have meaningful dialogue with those who hate us, demean our beliefs, or do not see us as worthy of God’s love.
But other people’s responses to us are always going to be largely out of our control. What we can control is our approach, and what I want to suggest is an approach that takes our own faith seriously without insisting we hold all the answers, looks for common ground where it exists, does not deny our differences, but considers them through the filter of love and compassion, and acknowledges that we are all seeking the sacred in the best way we know how and that perhaps it is not simply ignorance, wrong-headedness, or the deceptions of Satan that keep you from believing as I do.
Robert McAfee Brown has offered nine general suggestions for ecumenical exchange in this spirit of faithful but compassionate interaction, and they also begin with the rejection of absolute certainty. These suggestions also include surrendering the belief that my tradition is better than your tradition, rejecting the agenda that we only dialogue so that you can ultimately see the wisdom of my position, and recognizing the cultural baggage that encompasses all our faith convictions. Further, Brown advocates the sharing of stories to recognize our common humanity, and learning about other faiths through those stories and not through outside interpreters from our own tradition. Finally, Brown says, we do all these things to discover who we really are, and these are matters of real urgency, since the failure to live peacefully with those unlike us, is, as the New Atheists do have right, the most immediate human threat to our race. [1]
To understand what these things might look like, we can use a meeting between people of non-Christian faiths as a sort of laboratory that doesn’t necessarily put our own issues on the line, although it certainly illuminates them. In The Jew in the Lotus, his account of how a delegation of Jewish rabbis from various traditions were invited to meet with the Dalai Lama, my friend Rodger Kamenetz observed some of these qualities of interfaith dialogue for which I want to argue. This meeting was, first, a dialogue between groups who were assumed to have something of value to each other; many Jews have been attracted to Buddhism as a practice, which rabbis wanted to understand, while the continuity of Jewish culture and belief during the many years before they again had a homeland made the Dalai Lama think their tradition had something to teach the people of Tibet. In their time together, they listened to as well as spoke to each other, and what emerged from this dialogue was understanding and mutual compassion—and something spiritually powerful, as well. Rodger discovered that this dialogue and journey actually transformed him from someone only marginally Jewish into someone devoted to his faith. In other words, he did not understand who he truly was until he had engaged in this conversation with believers of a different tradition.
The group sought to understand commonalities between their faiths—the Dalai Lama had expressed an interest in Jewish contemplative practices, both cultures had experience with the difficulties of exile, and both traditions placed compassion and justice at their hearts. But this meeting did not assume that there were not fundamental differences between them, which was illustrated by how much maneuvering it took between the rabbis of different traditions to negotiate the prayer of thanksgiving the Jewish delegation wanted to pray upon greeting the Dalai Lama, and even by the issue of how to address the Dalai Lama himself. “His Holiness” is the typical form of address, as you may know, and some of the Jews (as might also be true with some Christians and Muslims) had difficulties with this title.
Both questions revolved around wanting to recognize this man, one of the world’s great spiritual and ethical leaders, without going so far as to call him holy, since only God is holy. (And while we might argue that we seek holiness in our spiritual journey, as we, made in the image of the holy God, seek to become ever more like God, I we can also see where this might be a sticking point; we reverence God alone.)
The Jewish delegation also rejected honorifics for the Dalai Lama that might be translated as “savior,” since such a figure would seem to be involved in the act of salvation which only God can provide. One of the Jews explained the liturgical and linguistic contortions in this way: “We would like to say a word in honor—it’s not that we don’t want to honor—it’s like saying we understand, we honor you as a source of teaching and blessing for your adherents.” But not, he implied, as a savior or holy one we Jews recognize or reverence; it was their faithful attempt to honor a great man and a great wisdom tradition while remaining true to their own beliefs. [2]
The exchanges between Jews and Buddhists on this trip were challenging, but also fruitful and necessary. One of the Orthodox Jewish rabbis, Irving Greenberg explained why, in a pluralistic world, there is great value in interfaith dialogue: “The big question on the religious agenda is how people rooted in their own religion are able to respond to others. We must learn to affirm our truth while doing true justice to the other.” Honest encounters with different modes of belief prevent a religious person from thinking he or she possesses the whole, or sole, truth, Rabbi Greenberg said. “God’s will is for us to learn how to affirm our full truth doing full justice to the other, not partial justice or twisted justice, or a secondhand treatment.” [3]
Another rabbi, Abraham Heschel, was one of America’s great heroes of interfaith dialogue; he often worked with people of other faiths on issues of common interest. He marched with Martin Luther King in the deep South when white Southern religious leaders could not be seen in his company. But as William Sloane Coffin points out, while it may be true that “God dwells with every committed Jew, Moslem, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu who believes religious pluralism to be God’s will,” Rabbi Heschel pointed out that “’the first and most important prerequisite for interfaith is faith.’” [4]
What Coffin meant was that I do not honor my Muslim brother or Jewish sister by pretending not to be deeply and happily Christian, nor am I taking their faith seriously if I pretend to more commonality than we possess and diminish our differences. These distinctive paths to God should be seen as distinctive; at the same time, I believe that they are worthy of honor. The Hindu sage Ramakrishna once wrote that there are many ways to climb to the roof, all of them valid; the Christian sage C. S. Lewis once wrote that those of us who have already found our room in God’s house should behave with great gentleness to all of those still looking for theirs. Although our first honor is to our own path, there is much we can learn from each other, not the least being that perhaps God does not call us to force others off their paths.
[1] Robert McAfee Brown, Speaking of Christianity: Practical Compassion, Social Justice, and Other Wonders (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 117-120.
[2] Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 46-48.
[3] Ibid, 49.
[4] William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 85.
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