Introduction

This article is offered as a reflection on the recent statement from the WCC, entitled ‘Religious Plurality and Christian Self-Understanding’ (Current Dialogue 45, July 2005). The statement rightly recognizes that the contextual challenges and opportunities within the fact of global religious plurality continue to deepen and take new forms according to the twists and turns of historical change. By yoking together the three networks of Faith and Order, the Conference on World Mission and Evangelism, and the Office on Interreligious Relations and Dialogue, we can applaud the WCC’s instinctive honesty in placing religious plurality at the centre of Christian self-reflection.

There is a further, related reason for applauding the decision to yoke together the three networks in this exploration. As the world splinters into more and more specialisms – a phenomenon also experienced in theological studies – collaboration together borders on a bold counter-cultural move. It is as though internal Christian plurality, as this is organized around separated disciplinary endeavours (as opposed to separated ecclesial denomin-ations), is turning to forge its own unity of purpose and theological common ground. In a sense, this mirrors the very problem presented by religious plurality itself, namely, the problem of ‘the one and the many’, in its current twenty-first century guise.

The separation between theology, mission and interreligious dialogue was always arbitrary anyway. Yet given that theology, mission and dialogue each come to the table with their own developed shapes, historical trajectories and assumptions about the centrality of their own place in the Christian scheme of things, the attempt at co-operation between them will not be an easy journey to undertake. Moreover, each discourse in itself is not a settled enterprise and therefore part of the achievement of the consensus in ‘Religious Plurality and Christian Understanding’ is that it represents a considerable advance on a former lamentable state of affairs.

Yet the statement must be counted a ‘work in progress’. In my view, it is seeking to transcend the ‘traditional’ struggle between the potentially opposing pulls of mission and dialogue, and, not surprisingly, that struggle is not easily resolved. The focus on the notion of ‘hospitality’ is, at one level, a stroke of genius, for it drags the debate away from the usual battle ground of Christian uniqueness versus worldly plurality. This is its strength. But it may also be that highlighting the concept of ‘hospitality’ amounts to a strategy of deflection away from the arbitration between mission and dialogue that is now required if we are to face the theological issues squarely. Yet I acknowledge that it is perhaps a necessary deflection, especially for the globally troubled times that we have entered. When international relations are so preoccupied with religiously-motivated violence, valuing ‘hospitality’ could well act as a necessary antidote to the endemic fears that are the result of the misperception and stereotyping of the so-called ‘other’.

Hospitality: Ethics or Theology?

Given the historically agonized tension between mission and dialogue, it is no accident that ‘Religious Plurality and Christian Self-Understanding’ defers to what is essentially an ethical category in the arbitration between them. It’s applicability to both international relations and internal Christian division is telling. But ‘hospitality’ remains an ethical category and functions essentially to encourage relationships with people of different faith communities. In other words, it belongs most fittingly at the dialogue end of the tension between mission and dialogue. I say this irrespective both of the fact that both Christian mission is not these days antagonistic to notions of hospitality and of the incarnational and trinitarian theological underpinning in the Christian belief of the transforming graciousness of God in Christ that the statement celebrates.

I have long thought that the era of seeking theological permission for engaging in dialogue and co-operation with people of different faiths has now passed. The Statement endorses this perspective. Building on a permission that is more than 25 years old (The WCC Guidelines were issued in 1979), hospitality leads to expectations that God has more in store for us than we once thought possible. If hospitality extends the hand of friendship to others then it is an extension also to the faith or spirit which moves within them, be that a Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist (and so on) spirit. In this sense the Baar (1990) achievement that other religions embody not only a ‘seeking’ but also a ‘finding’ of transcendent reality from within different matrices of human response and religious insight is reinforced by this new Statement. I might add that this theological judgment is born out according to the witness of many in the dialogue movement. The resultant theological question forced into the open by our changed circumstances and mood is whether or not the traditional theology which first motivated that permission for dialogue is sufficient to bear the consequences of it. Dialogue is proving to be a Trojan horse. Might it be that hospitality will turn out similarly to be subversive?

One small indication that it might do so is contained in the following observation: ‘Religious Plurality and Christian Self-Understanding’ has dropped the language of ‘one and only’, ‘uniqueness’ and ‘finality’. Hospitality is not so hard-edged as these theological concepts might like us to be. It allows us to soft pedal their question mark hovering over the acceptance of others in their ‘seeking’ and ‘finding’. This is clearly an advantage in terms of building relationships. But, as I pointed out above, it is at the expense of making adjustments in our theology of religious plurality which hospitality is bound to invite; otherwise, we remain in the realm of ethical permission-giving and not theological consequence-taking once we really do accept with full seriousness the religious plurality of our world.

The theological dilemma can be sharpened by recalling a question put by the Vatican’s International Theological Commission in 1997: “How can one enter into an interreligious dialogue, respecting all religions and not considering them in advance as imperfect and inferior, if we recognize in Jesus Christ and only in him the unique and universal Saviour of mankind?” That question having been raised, however, the Commission did not proceed to tackle it head-on. Similarly, the WCC Statement has side-stepped the awkward conceptual territory highlighted by the Commission’s question. Does this mean that, for the time being, we are content to place the theological anxieties on one side as dialogue, co-operation and hospitality continue the work of encounter into an unknown future? Given the lack of consensus on these matters, this may well be the case, and perhaps there is much about it to commend as a strategy of engagement. My own hunch, however, is that sooner or later the theological questions will return.

What then is the relationship between the three hitherto independently developed arenas of mission, dialogue and theology, so fruitfully yoked together in the Statement? I suggest, as an alternative model, that the theology of religions acts as arbiter between the pulls of dialogue and mission. As has often been pointed out, both mission and dialogue are not so polar opposites as we previously imagined them to be. They have both expanded conceptually in recent years. On the one hand, the heart of mission is the Missio Dei which is inevitably bigger than the church’s own participation in it. How can this not be the case? So, commending the Christian faith is not something that is now shouted from the rooftops but is carried out as part of relationships with others. There is a Christian story to commend but it is best commended within a dialogical framework. On the other hand, dialogue, while it has nurtured its own framework of equal respect, mutual accountability and critical reasoning, it remains the science of the ‘in-between’: there are convictions to be heard and made sense of in the light of what we know about how the world works. Beyond the caricatures both of mission as imperialism-by-another-name and of dialogue as a we’re-all-the-same-really kind of tea-party there is work to do. That work is theological.

Theology of Religions

The theology of religions seeks to interpret the meaning of religious plurality in the light of what we know of other traditions, our experience of their impact (their goodness and their negative effects), and the role of critical reasoning (the recognition of the role of history and culture in formulating religious beliefs, spiritualities and ethical postures, and so on). It notes that a religious account of what I call ‘transcendent vision and human transformation’ is glimpsed through a particular concrete focus. That concrete focus might be a scripture, a person, a part of the natural world. In other words, the religions are rooted in concrete experience (particular) but are expansive in their intention and effects (universal).

The theology of religions interprets this structure of particularity and universal relevance among the religions in different ways. Here are three possibilities:
You can export your own particular experience and think that the expansiveness which it glimpses ought to take the shape of your own particular glimpsing, i.e. the universality must be defined by the particularity of your own glimpsing – with the result that everyone should become Christian.

You can export your own particular experience and not be surprised to find other experiences of comparable goodness and worth – that’s what the universal dimension within your own glimpsing ought to lead you to expect. On this view, the theology constrains you to think that other kinds of particularity or rootedness are necessarily measured by your own tradition’s experience. In Christian terms, this is done by saying that what is manifest in Jesus is either the origin or the goal, or both, of the universal presence of God in the world. On this view, the fullness of religious vision lies with the Christian version of it but others might participate in that fullness according to degrees and according to their different histories and circumstances.

You can export your particular experience and say that the glimpse of ultimate reality through your own tradition’s lens is necessary for the world and its transformation, but necessary as part of the necessity of others also, others whose histories have demonstrated vitality and transformative power. Each religion has a view of the whole of reality from out of the window of its tradition but it is a partial viewing.

So how do these three positions relate to the tension between mission and dialogue? All three positions here accept a role for mission – all three accept that there is a Christian story to relate and that others should hear it, whether that’s for conversion, or for their edification that something greater is available than what they have known thus far, or for the sake of sharing and learning from the differences. But how do they deal with the new information from dialogue and hospitality?

Attitude (a) has difficulties. If your theology leads you to expect very little of ‘transcendent vision and human transformation’ elsewhere then you are likely to be embroiled in a serious misrepresentation of others. And we know that this has happened all too often in the history of Christian relations with people of many faiths. For example, we might recall Hendrik Kraemer’s comment that “Islam in its constitutive elements and apprehensions must be called a superficial religion … Islam might be called a religion that has almost no questions and no answers.” This is an astonishing statement from a scholar of Islam! It is little wonder that many Muslims (and others) have wondered about the validity of the Christian invitation to dialogue when basic mutual respect is missing.

The most common position in Christian circles is attitude (b). God’s presence in our world is everywhere hidden, but our glimpsing of it can only be measured by our inherited Christian theological and conceptual framework. The difficulties with this are well-known. How can Jesus initiate the salvation of the Buddhist or the Hindu, both of whom belong to traditions that are older than the appearance of Jesus on earth? And both have generated equally impressive results in terms of ethics and civilisation. What does it mean for the incarnate Word or the resurrected Christ or the Spirit of God – choose your Christian formulation of words (words readily employed by ‘Religious Plurality and Christian Self-Understanding’) – to be operative in the world as the decisive focus for the spiritual vitality of others? Theologians who realise this problem seek to ameliorate the effects of this approach by pushing the problem to the point of a post-mortem encounter with Christ for other believers. However, this does nothing to answer the central problem. The encounter with Christ as necessity is retained; only the manner and moment of encounter is changed.

The third view (c) notes that all traditions make some distinction between ultimate reality as known in concrete particular ways and ultimate reality as being beyond human comprehension (ineffable). In the final analysis, all traditions are rafts, a means to an end, and they conceptualize these means and ends according to the best lights they have. But all lights are limited – pointers, metaphors and symbolic representations – and this is because religious language depicts but does not reproduce the ultimate truth of our condition and the meaning of life. The infinity of ultimate reality is the deeper ineffable ground of the many phenomenal manifestations of religious insight and truth. An empirical justification for hypothesising this might be that the traditions show themselves to be comparable at the empirical level – producers of both good and bad in spiritual insight and practice. No one tradition has been greater than another in history. It is important to stress that, on this view, radical differences between the religions are retained, for the religions are historically specific in so many ways, but their mutual belongingness in transcendence is also affirmed.

Some have objected to this outlook in so far as it seems to arrive at a tidy conclusion too quickly. Religions, they aver, have different aims, different expected outcomes: so Christian love is not the same as Buddhist compassion; and Christian justice is not the same as Muslim justice, and so on. We cannot therefore assume that we are all united, even in the realms of ineffability. There just are differences. We can respect one another, we can encounter without assuming superiority, we might even perceive something in the other that enriches our own outlook and which has emerged more fully in another tradition than our own. But don’t assume we all meet somewhere, even if that somewhere is mystical.

My own reaction to this criticism is that it simply misses the mark. View (c) is an inductive view. It notes that Christian faith is based on experience that we believe can be trusted, and this basis can be extended also to others. At this point you then have to make sense of the manyness of religious life theologically. Emphasising the radical differences is fine. But that does not prevent us making the inductive move that as Christian faith is not a projection but a trust of experience and a cognitive response to what we call the divine reality, and that this is partially confirmed by its spiritual fruits, so we can hypothesise that the same is true for others. This then leaves us with the problem of how to explain the diversity of religious life, assuming that the religious life is a valid life based on a varied sense of transcendence and with equal impressiveness and equal unimpressiveness to Christianity among the religions. How to allow for both radical differences and also the intuition of relatedness that is apprehended in and through dialogical encounters? How to honour the assumptions, impact and discoveries implicit in hospitality itself? Simply to say we are all different and that’s that seems insufficient in the face of the evidence and the practice. Theology has to catch up with the practice.

Conclusion

My thesis has been that both mission and dialogue have had their suspicions of one another but that time has passed. However, the overtures that the one makes to the other require grounding in a theology of religions that enables a new relationship to flourish. Mission is required to surrender the corner of the mind that assumes that one religion alone is eventually superior in terms of experience, insight, and praxis. Dialogue must renounce residual notions that all religions are variations on the same theme. The thrust of mission is to supply religious identity on which dialogue thrives; dialogue and hospitality, in turn, become the new context within which mission learns to practise the mutuality of respect and the mystery of ineffability.

A citation from the late Stanley Samartha captures the mood I am seeking:

If the great religious traditions of humanity are indeed different responses to the Mystery of God or Sat or the Transcendent or Ultimate Reality, then the distinctiveness of each response, in this instance the Christian, should be stated in such a way that a mutually critical and enriching relationship between different responses becomes naturally possible.
(Stanley Samartha, One Christ- Many Religions, 1991).

The ethics of hospitality takes us to the threshold of this vision. A theology of religious plurality, affirming the full validity of the great religious traditions, yet ‘mutually critical and enriching’, keeps the theology of hospitality honest.

The Revd Dr Alan Race is Editor-in-Chief of 'Interreligious Insight: a Journal of Dialogue and Engagement' and a member of the World Congress of Faiths. He is currently Rector of St. Andrew's Anglican Church, Leicester, and an active member of the Leicester Council of Faiths.

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