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Reflections on Interreligious Dialogue
Robert Cummings Neville
Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology
Boston University
A recent (December, 2013) conference on “Spiritual Foundations and Chinese Culture: A Philosophical Approach” at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei displayed many fascinating aspects of interreligious dialogue. For some participants, the topic meant comparing similarities and differences between Christianity on the one hand and the Chinese religions of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. For others, the interesting question was to understand how the living practice of a religion (Christianity, for most participants) is shaped by different cultural foundations, the European versus the East Asian.
Interreligious dialogue has two levels, usually mixed together and neither prior to the other. One level is that of comparative theology, which is the attempt to understand as much as possible what the religions being compared say and do. This requires Herculean efforts at overcoming bias, developing comparative categories that are continually corrected so as not to represent several religions in the terms that apply easily to one but not the others. Most comparison in the last two centuries has been undertaken and conceptualized by European-trained scholars who assume that the categories native to Christianity (and perhaps Judaism) are the natural ones for articulating other religions, which has led to silly results. For instance, Buddhism was sometimes regarded as not a religion because it had no God, or too many Gods; Confucianism has sometimes been thought to be only an ethical system, not a religion, because of its lack of a supernatural deity. The category of “conceptions of God” turns out to be pernicious for comparison; but the category of “ultimate reality” is much better because it allows for comparing theistic religions with those whose ultimate is the Dao, Emptiness, or Brahman.
The moral imperative for inquiry in comparative theology is scrupulous control for bias, making sure that one’s favorite religion does not set the terms for comparison. This moral imperative stands in direct contrast with what certain scholars say, namely, that comparison is always made from the standpoint of one’s own religion. They claim that honest commitment to one’s own religion is always the starting point, allowing for possible insight into what other religions say because of deep experience of one’s own. To be sure, we are always historically located and can never be purely unbiased. The proper imperative for comparative theology, however, is fairness to all, not faithfulness to one’s own religion. When one compares other religions from the standpoint of one’s own, that is what scholars call “theology of religions,” and it is part of one’s own religion’s theology.
The second level of interreligious dialogue is assessment and persuasion. Comparative theology is descriptive, but it leads to consideration of normative issues. This usually takes its root in articulating the deep experience and truth of one’s own religion and is the motive for “theology of religions.” Of course we care about the truth of religion, the authenticity and depth of experience, and the many dimensions of salvation involved. The delicate part of interreligious dialogue is maintaining respect for the other that allows one to be vulnerable to correction. Religions differ in what is allowed at this point. For some people, commitment to or membership in one’s own religion precludes the possibility of learning from the other something that might call one’s own theology into question. For others, concern for the truth of religion trumps what one’s institutional commitments might be so that one wants to redefine one’s own religion in terms of whatever turns out to be true. Genuine dialogue requires the latter approach. The former turns out to be proclamation rather than dialogue.
These first two remarks might make it seem as if interreligious dialogue were merely about doctrines. The Fu Jen conference showed that this is a superficial view of religion. Religious ideas and practices rest upon and are conditioned by all sorts of cultural conditions, and these are in constant transformation. Earliest Christianity was based on the interpretation of the life of Jesus, a rural Galilean, in terms of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, to a largely urban community of Jews and gentiles around the Mediterranean. Then Christianity was built on top of African cultures, European cultures, and the cultures of India and China. These cultures became defining parts of Christianity: “Easter” is the name of a Norse goddess. Can Christianity find cultural embodiment in pre-Christian Chinese cultures, as it did in pre-Christian European cultures? Does Christianity require the abandonment of the Chinese spiritual foundations and their replacement with Western imports? These are living questions, made famous by the debates about Mateo Ricci but continuing today. Neither easy “nationalism” nor “take it or leave it” provincialism is worthy of serious religion. Precisely here is where interreligious dialogue needs to be unbiased on the one hand and deeply concerned for truth and value on the other. The question is not about a superficial comparison of religious traditions in general or of representative figures. Rather it is about the layers and layers of cultural interactions that provide the spiritual foundations for living religions. It is about the cultural embodiments that are possible or impossible for given populations of individuals.
To me it was clear at the Fu Jen conference that we need to pay attention to the careful development of a theory of religion that can itself be criticized. We all had theories of religion in our working assumptions, but open dialogue requires that we make these explicit. Furthermore, we should not acquiesce to the social constructionists who say that religion is merely a matter of culture and is not about anything real. Religion is the way human beings engage what is ultimate in life in the many dimensions of ultimacy. Social scientists might say that we cannot know what is ultimate and therefore should avoid understanding religion in its terms. But any religious person believes that their religion is about something, that it arises in the engagement of something real. To be sure, each religion engages with its own cultural symbols. But those symbols are layers and layers deep, and have a long history. Moreover, the great religious traditions have been learning from one another for millennia, even when they “baptize” elements of the other religions into their own institutions.
What religions learn from most, however, is not from borrowing one another’s symbols, or even serious dialogue. It is rather from the actual engagement of ultimate things. All religions have the same ultimate things to engage, because those ultimate realities are real. And so I suspect that, despite very important cultural differences, the great religions of the world have very similar deep structures. Or, to put it another way, the great religions have similar strategies and tensions about engaging the ultimates. All the great religions have debates about free will and determinism, about whether the self ultimately should be unified or emptied, about whether the imperative to be compassionate requires pacifism or allows for military defense, about whether one’s ultimate destiny is particular or is absorbed into a greater reality, and about whether and how to be grateful for a creation that includes suffering and death.
In the long run, I don’t think there is much interesting dialogue between “East” and “West.” So many levels of interconnection within and among religions make that simplistic dichotomy moot. The real dialogue is about how, and with what symbols, to engage what is ultimately real.