AU Wackerlin Center for Faith and Action

What sort of dialogue is interfaith dialogue?

A curious word: dialogue. When have you ever said: ‘I’m just going to dialogue with my friend’? Never, surely. You’d say: ‘I’m just going to talk with my friend’. Or have you ever announced that you were going to dialogue with your mother? No! Again, you’d mean that you were going to talk with her; or else you could use the expression in a slightly mocking way to indicate that you’re going to stand meekly by whilst she issues you your orders for the week.

Dialogue is used by some scholars to indicate a set piece and often one-sided conversation, such as the second century Christian father Justin Martyr’s dialogue with the Jew Trypho. Usually, it has an element of grandstanding about it, trying to persuade an audience to take a particular position. In this case you know that the writer is going to swing the outcome so that Justin is pronounced right and Trypho is exposed as failing to measure up to truth’s highest standards.

So dialogue’s rather an artificial word. It isn’t used in everyday encounters with ordinary people, talking about the weather, the price of gas, the unpredictability of teenage girls, and all the usual things of life.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve been to a large number of interfaith dialogue meetings in many different countries: Turkey, France, Canada, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Russia, India, Hungary and other places. Sometimes the official dialogical bit, where we listen to set piece speeches by people, has been the disappointing time when speakers have either tried to score points against another (often misunderstood) position or else have pointed to some rather low-level common ground where we can all stand and ignore a range of disagreements between us. To be fair, some talks have been better, even much better, than that. Yet the best parts of the meetings have always been when we’ve eaten, drunk, and talked with each other in a relaxed way, building friendships that, for some of us, have endured. These friendships enable us to be honest, open, and vulnerable about what we truly give our life to: to be human, in fact.

So I’d like to make the suggestion that we hesitate to affirm the value of dialogue as a kind of ritual lecture. Often, nothing much of value happens when someone shares her or his view of the world, which may be delightful but is as likely to be obscure, trivial, inflexible and dull. You might think that I’m offering you an admirable illustration of this point, so I’ll move swiftly on.

This may be the moment to tell you how, many years ago, I was denounced as a hypocrite by a few members of the British Methodist conference. That conference is the annual governing body of the national church, and, in a speech to it, someone had called for Mrs. Thatcher, then prime minister of my country, to be invited to dialogue with the conference at its session the following year. I spoke against the proposal, pointing out that we knew what she would say, since she always said it, and that her capacity to listen to alternative opinions was, well, limited. It therefore struck me as a pointless exercise, since all it would do would be to give her a privileged platform to air well-known views that didn’t strike me as being particularly Methodist or, indeed, particularly Christian. It wasn’t one of my more tactful speeches and I obviously touched a nerve in a few of the lady’s political supporters. One person told me that fuzzy liberals like me (his description, not mine) only believed in dialogue when it suited us. I tried patiently to explain that listening to Mrs. Thatcher drone on about her convictions, which were impervious to reason, religion or any other questioning, was to be subjected to a formidable monologue, and had nothing to do with dialogue at all. So why would I submit patiently to what I thought was self-serving humbug? (Actually, I wasn’t being quite straightforward about dialogue, which isn’t the opposite of monologue, as I’ll explain shortly. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to prick a pompous bubble or two.) I often wonder about that incident, and whether I was right. Winston Churchill once observed that ‘to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war’, and he should know. I think you have to talk, especially with those with whom you passionately disagree, but you also need to decide when talking is pointless and even counter-productive.

What neither those ardent supporters of the Iron Lady, nor many proponents of interfaith dialogue realize is that, even when used in the context of conversation, whether one-sided or genuinely mutually engaged, the concept of dialogue isn’t just a weary willingness to hear others tell us what lights their fire. I’ve been known to mock many dialogical meetings as displaying a sort of well-bred ‘more tea, vicar’ scenario, where polite but bored people go through the motions of pretending to be interested in events, whether the parson’s visit or the religious expert’s lecture, that in reality rank as about as enthralling as an encounter with a dentist’s drill.

In its Greek origin, the word ‘dialogue’ is far from boring, one-sided and one-dimensional. It’s dramatic; it’s life-changing; it has teeth. My friend and mentor Kenneth Cracknell has explained how it was used by the author of the New Testament book, Acts of the Apostles, when the apostle Paul goes into the synagogue in Ephesus. For three months, he dialogued there about God’s kingdom until his message irritated enough of his hearers for him to remove to another place, where he dialogued with people for two more years. We need to note two things about the author’s use of this concept of dialogue. On the one hand, Paul’s dialogue kept him in the synagogue for a full three months. He was obviously sufficiently courteous and reflective and attentive to others for him to stay that long. If he’d been plain-speaking to the point of rudeness, he wouldn’t have lasted three minutes. On the other hand, after three months he’d ruffled feathers, doubtless because of his insistence that Jesus was God’s messiah, and felt it best to move to another venue. By the time Paul left Ephesus, the author of Acts tells us, with pardonable exaggeration, that everyone in the province of Asia (modern Turkey, more or less) heard the word of God. This brief account in chapter 19 of Acts helps us to draw out important strands that go up to make the thread of dialogue. Dialogue is courteous, attentive, reflective and conversational. Yet it’s based on strongly-held convictions that it seeks to share. So it’s controversial and can stir up opposition as well as support. It makes a difference, causing many people to think and wonder, and some to change their lives radically. If we engage in dialogue and minimize one of these strands, we may distort the meaning of dialogue. If we are courteous and bland; or self-absorbed to the point of deafness to others; or so rude that our partners are repelled by us: then the strategy of dialogue will not achieve an equivalent of Paul’s impressive result of letting the word of God be heard by many people.

Many people, including a surprising number of scholars (who should know better) assume that the opposite of dialogue is monologue: instead of two people talking you have one person ranting on. Not so! The Greek word ‘logos’ is a world-view, a conviction about ultimate reality, what is really real and worth giving your life to and for. The word ‘dia’ means ‘through’, not ‘two’. So dialogue is working out your world view through to some conclusion or conclusions. Paul passionately wanted people to know that Jesus was God’s messiah and that, through him, God’s promises to his people the Jews had been shared with the rest of humankind, the gentiles. So he talked about it with people, successfully enough that much of Turkey heard God’s word, even if only some of inhabitants did anything about it.

What this means is that biblical dialogue implies a certain controversy. When God speaks with and through his prophets or to his people in some other way, he isn’t always affirming them, offering them an A grade for C level work, and explaining away their selfish and manipulative deeds as a search for personal freedom and self-fulfillment. He’s not a candidate for political office, nor a third-rate professor who wants to please rather than educate students. He’s known to lead, to challenge, to rebuke, to judge, to condemn, though is willing to forgive, and displays patience and love.

Dialogue isn’t about turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to what you think isn’t so. For example, since I don’t believe that the Bible was dictated by God word for word to its writers, I don’t share similar Muslim views about the Qur’an as the Word of God. And the more I hear of the Tao Te Ching, the more I think it to be fine-sounding folderol. Now, this may be my loss and my failure of discernment, but it’s pointless, condescending and simply wrong to pretend to accept what you can’t. We can respect, admire and learn from people who believe and practice different things than we do, but there’s something unworthy about pretending to share their views. This pretence can be intra- as well as inter-faith. Whenever I encounter the sort of Christian who has no time for environmental issues on the grounds that Jesus is coming again very soon (the sort of Christian who often has a sticker on their car like: ‘In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned’) I can almost bring myself to believe in their judgmental God, and hope that he’ll zap them good and proper! Almost, but not quite. This illustration suggests that some religious beliefs not only cannot command our allegiance, but don’t even deserve our respect. This is a hard but necessary thing to say in talking about religious people’s opinions, especially in this country, where respect is expected to be bestowed on everyone, even when they say and do the damnedest things. But, for example, we don’t need, and should strongly challenge, the view that about our fragile planet isn’t worth taking care of.

So far I have implied that dialogue is about words: speaking, conversation, and reading. Protestant Christianity isn’t alone among the world’s religious paths in emphasizing the Word. But some religions don’t stress words at all: primal faiths, like Native American religions, have no scriptures. And even scriptural religions like our own and, say Islam, cannot be reduced to texts and sermons, despite what some of their more wordy followers insist. They are about relationships: with God and other humans, which involve more than vocal stuff. They are about deeds. And about other things, too.

Let’s look at three other ways of interpreting dialogue.

The first is the dialogue of life. The spur to this approach is that it’s in the process of meeting to do things with others as well as talk with them, that people learn to appreciate them and their quest for life’s meaning. Some organizations bring together people across religious boundaries, at conferences or for meals or in joint projects. For example, the Inter Faith Youth Core in Chicago gathers young people of different religions for days of service. Working together as, say, Jews and Muslims, they often find it difficult to demonize each other, and they can learn that justice and hope and peace and love and common humanity are not the preserve of one group of people. Local interfaith groups across the world have been doing this for decades. Some individuals have encouraged followers to live the dialogue of life on the wider social scene. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa and others have had the knack of being faithful to their own tradition, yet inspiring others to work with them for the common good. They’ve also angered some members of their own religious community for stretching out the hand of friendship and co-operation to others, but the risk you take in being righteous is to irritate the self-righteous. It can be a considerable risk: Gandhi was murdered for his inclusive deeds and actions by a member of his own Hindu faith.

Another and related interpretation of dialogue is to emphasize ethics and moral action. In recent years, the Global Ethic project has been the most notable example of this. The project became fairly widely known when 143 leaders from across the spectrum of the world’s religions signed up to it at the 1993 meeting of The Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. (This ‘Parliament’ celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the original one, held as part of the Columbian Exposition in 1893.) The Global Ethic project condemned the parlous state of the world, for example: the looting of the planet’s resources; widespread poverty; and particularly “aggression and hatred in the name of religion”. Those who signed up to it affirmed that “there is an irrevocable, unconditional norm for all areas of life, for families and communities, for races, nations, and religions. There already exist ancient guidelines for human behavior which are found in the teachings of the religions of the world and which are the condition for a sustainable world order.” (http://www.religioustolerance.org/parliame.htm) These guidelines are summarized in the Golden Rule; about which, more soon. Behind this declaration was the distinguished German theologian Hans Kűng, whose followers canvassed widely for signatures at the 1993 meeting.

Kűng had written a book in 1990 called Global Responsibility (English translation 1991) in which he argued that religions can contribute to world peace only if they reaffirm and live out their core values. He spelled out his conviction that there can be

• No peace among the nations without peace among the religions.
• No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions.
• No dialogue between the religions without investigation of the foundations of the religions.

This three-fold conviction was what he took to Chicago. He persuaded the Parliament to affirm four directives:

• Commitment to a culture of non-violence and respect for life.
• Commitment to a culture of solidarity and a just economic order.
• Commitment to a culture of tolerance and a life of truthfulness.
• Commitment to a culture of equal rights and partnership between men and women.

In the wake of the Chicago Parliament, a number of scholars and practitioners of interfaith dialogue took up the cause of the Global Ethic. Books were written, some rather learned and others more popular in tone. Kűng’s Global Ethic Foundation opened in Germany in 1995. Temple University, Philadelphia, also has a Center for Global Ethics, under the guidance of Leonard Swidler.

Much worthy material has been produced. It has brought politicians, economists, and many people together to talk about justice and peace. That can’t be bad! However, there are strong criticisms that can be leveled against it.

For a start, it’s rather elitist. Kűng got members of the 1993 Chicago meeting to sign up to what he had drafted. They validated his work, but didn’t contribute to it in any significant way. I think it would have been a better document and commanded wider support if more people, particularly women, had participated in the process of bringing it to birth rather than simply giving it their approval with a few modest changes. It’s also rather naïve. Kűng approached politicians to approve of his initiative, and some have done so. It never harms a politician’s image to be in favor of peace; when it suits him. Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, gave the first annual lecture of the Global Ethic Foundation at Tubingen in 2001, on the theme of ‘Values and the Power of Community’. But then he went to war, against the majority opinion of the United Nations, and even of the citizens of his own country. The Global Ethic project is also surprisingly naïve about how religions (as well as politicians) operate in the real world. The four commitments I mentioned may be practiced by some religious people, but by no means all. Take for instance the ‘commitment to a culture of equal rights and partnership between men and women’. The rise of contemporary women’s movements in the world religions illustrates how far religions mostly are from furthering this aim. It’s just as tempting for religious people to define their religions idealistically as it is for secular critics to view them gloomily at their worst.

That naïveté extends to the attempt to locate the Golden Rule as an ethical principle upon which members of all religions can agree. You will recall that the Golden Rule tells us to treat others as we ourselves would want to be treated. That maxim can be found in one form or another in most of the world’s religions. Yet the Golden Rule is not usually seen as the heart of religion by faith-full people, but simply as the obvious starting point for a religious and humane vision of life. Take the famous story in first century BCE Judaism recorded in the Talmud: Shabbat 31:

A certain heathen came to [Rabbi] Shammai and said to him, “Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Thereupon he repulsed him with the rod which was in his hand. When he went to [Rabbi] Hillel, he said to him, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; all the rest of it is commentary; go and learn.”

It’s hard not to sympathize with Shammai’s response to a person who trivializes and reduces a great religion to some simple slogan, though perhaps Hillel was more sensible (and compassionate) to try and draw that trivial interlocutor into abandoning sound-bites for the joys and wisdom of paddling in the shallows of the ocean of truth. Hillel suggests to him that he should learn the commentary which would give him the means of figuring out why the Golden Rule is important. In other words, the Golden Rule does not exist out there as the ethical ideal upon which all can agree. It, as all our beliefs and practices, springs from within, out of a person’s deepest convictions, whether they are shaped by Christianity, Islam, secular beliefs or whatever. It’s not a bad thing to locate ground rules for people, and the Golden Rule is a good place to start. But to overestimate its importance is foolish, and a failure to understand the deepest resources of religion to heal our wounded souls and our wounded world.

So far I’ve mentioned dialogue as: a process of words; the dialogue of life; commitment to the Golden Rule. One final strand of dialogue that I want to mention is an institutional commitment to dialogue, especially by the Christian churches. Since the reforms of the Roman Catholic Church’s second Vatican Council (1961-65), that Church has been much involved in dialogue, especially but not only with Jews. And since 1961, the World Council of Churches has brought together academics and activists from different Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christian denominations, often with advisors from other religions, to work on inter-religious relationships. Many individual denominations have made official statements about interfaith matters, mostly encouraging members to respect people of other faith. These official denominational statements are important. After the British Methodist Conference of 1994 made its statement about relationships with people of other religions, whenever I heard a dismissive comment from one of my Methodist brothers or sisters about Judaism or Islam, I would (mostly gently) ask them if they knew they were at odds with the teaching of their church.

It’s been possible for many Christian churches to make such official statements because they have an authority structure that makes collective decisions easier to make than is achievable in religions like Judaism or Islam, where mostly there is no papacy or other such institution that commands widespread loyalty and respect. Moreover, the contribution of Christianity’s teaching of contempt for the Jews to the Holocaust has been a powerful incentive for humane and civilized Christians to abandon exclusive and condemnatory teaching for strands in their tradition that emphasize justice, mercy, and love for God and humanity. The willingness of many Christian Churches (not, alas, of the ancient Orthodox churches of the East) to reflect and repent has encouraged some people from other religions to be honest about the bad as well as the good things they have inherited. All religions have their dark side. Beware those who claim otherwise, for they’re merely sweeping the bad stuff out of sight.

So, if we want to understand what sort of dialogue is inter-religious dialogue, we should reflect upon it as: a process of words; the dialogue of life; commitment to the Golden Rule; institutional action to redress past wrongs and to include others within the scope of God’s transcendent grace. I’ve offered some criticisms of these four strands, but also want to affirm them as telling us something important about ourselves, others and the kind of God, God is.

If I had more time, I would explore the ethical dimension of dialogue rather more than I’ve had time to do. My Methodist heritage of faith has strongly emphasized the importance of holiness. By holiness, I mean the process of growing into goodness and into understanding what God requires and desires us to do and to be. The Eastern Orthodox churches have also stressed this, calling it theiosis or divinization: enabling us to be God-bearing to others and to the whole cosmos. Surely the concept of holiness is more rewarding than locating the Golden Rule, or the Ten Commandments, or some other thing or things as our rule of conduct. For holiness demands a process, a journey of faith, a vigilant and hopeful pilgrimage of life on which we expect to be surprised by God’s goodness and so warmed by it as to reflect some of it in our own actions.

Thus far, I’ve not mentioned the question of truth. Many practitioners of inter-religious dialogue avoid this issue like the plague. They claim that truth divides whereas seeking justice unites. I think that’s unhelpful and unwise. How can it be good and useful to avoid truth? I also think that their view is based upon a false notion of interpreting truth as a given and static thing. On this view: Muslims cling to the notion of the Qur’an as the Word of God, and Christians present Jesus as savior, and these views of truth are exclusive and alienating to people involved in the world of inter-religious dialogue, so should be used only for internal consumption, not for consideration by outsiders. But what if, like holiness, we interpret our apprehension of truth not as some essentialist thing but as a quest, a pilgrimage, a journey. For a Christian merely to proclaim Jesus as savior, or for a Muslim to parade the verbal inspiration of scripture, invites the question: so what? How do these truths act as a shining vision for us about God and God’s ways in the world? How do they make us behave? How do our representations of truth provide for us, not assured answers but light in a dark world, guiding us towards what is more deeply true than our limited human vision can ever grasp until we see God face to face? Socrates thought that truth was to be glimpsed as we ask questions. Jesus talked of doing the truth. Both these insights align more with an understanding of truth not as facts to be learned but as insights to be uncovered on a journey of openness, of faith. If truth is the most important of human concepts, how can we not share with others what we have grasped of it? And surely we can learn from what others have seen, like us, not perfectly but through a glass, darkly? We owe it to God and to ourselves to take the question of truth very seriously indeed. I rejoice to see the day when devotees of inter-religious dialogue respect each other and care for each other enough not just to seek justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God; but also to speak and share the truth in love.

Martin Forward