Ours is a world in which the largest faith communities are comprised of people who call themselves Muslims or Christians. Our respective traditions are alike in that they both make absolute claims. We both believe that faith in, and worship of, one sovereign God is both pleasing to God and a requirement for living a good life. We are both, in a sense, “missionary” religions: both of us consider the revelations that lie at the heart of our faith to be “good news,” and we invite others to share in that good news for the benefit of their own souls and to the benefit of God’s beloved creation.

We have both learned –not all of us in our respective communities, but probably most of us–that it is highly unlikely that we are going to be able to convince each other to become converts to our own tradition, whether that reluctance stems from genuine conviction or from our strong cultural backgrounds. We also, perhaps, realize that if it were moral to try to conquer each other militarily–and I don’t believe that it would be–if, in other words there were an attempt to provide religious justification for a war between Christians and Muslims, given the destructive capabilities now available to human beings, such a conflict would likely lead to mutual annihilation and would already be a symptom of spiritual annihilation. We are, in other words, to use a phrase often applied to less than ideal relationships, “stuck with each other.” And we can regard that compulsory coexistence as either as a burden that God has imposed on us or as a gift that God has given us. I personally have chosen the latter interpretation. I believe, in other words, that God has joined us in this sometimes uncomfortable relationship because of the call that we separately consider ourselves to have received from God to witness to each other, to admonish each other, and ultimately to love each other.

And not only do we witness to each other, we witness to, and in, the world, and we witness within our own communities. One of the essential components of this witness is that of telling the truth–telling the truth confessionally about our own shortcomings and telling the truth as well about our neighbors. One of the Ten Commandments, a commandment that reverberates throughout the Abrahamic tradition, is the injunction that we are not to bear false witness about our neighbors. We are to tell the truth, as best we can perceive it, about each other.

One of my mentors, the late Dr. Byron Haines, who was one of the initiators of the Christian-Muslim dialogue program of the National Council of Churches in the United States, used to refer to the human tendency to see the interreligious encounter as the encounter between the “ideal me” and the “real you.” Too often, he was saying, we judge ourselves on the basis of our ideals while we judge others on the basis of their behavior.

The gap between ideals and actual behavior, between the ideal me and the real you, leads to the development of stereotypes. And we know that stereotypes abound in the realm of Christian-Muslim relationships. Stereotypes are so powerful, so persistent and so destructive because they are more than wild flights of someone’s malicious imagination. They are not things that are just thought up. Stereotypes have power because they are based on the reality that, as St. Paul put it, “we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” As much as we would like to think that we consistently embody the ideals of our religion, we have all been, at times, the “real me.” We have all unwittingly and probably unwillingly contributed to the strengthening of someone else’s negative stereotype of our religion.

Let me give you a humble example. Three years ago, I participated in our dialogue in Tehran. My flight from New York took me first to London, and then on a British Airways flight to Tehran via Baku. When I boarded the flight in London, there were perhaps 12 to 15 Americans boarding with me. All of them disembarked in Baku–I’m told that there is oil in Azerbaijan–except for me. My Iranian seatmate grew increasingly alarmed as I failed to get off the airplane with the other Americans. “Baku!” he kept repeating. “Midunam,” I kept repeating back to him.

It turned out that his English was much better than my Persian, and we engaged in a kind of mini-dialogue during the remainder of our flight from Baku to Tehran. He was, to say the least, surprised that an American Christian was participating in a dialogue with Iranian Muslim scholars. This was, after all, just after the infamous “axis of evil” speech by President Bush. He pointed out that in Islam there is a clear understanding of the obligations of those who are blessed with material sufficiency toward those who are not. No pious Muslim would ever flaunt his wealth, because ostentatious wealth would indicate that the individual had not observed one of the pillars of Islam, zakat, the obligation to the poor. Such a person would be no better than a thief. America, he went on to say, flaunts its wealth internationally, and consequently the rest of the world, and especially the Islamic world, sees America as a global thief.

While this man’s critique was not per se a religious critique of America, because America is officially a secular country, it has a religious dimension because a very large majority of Americans consider themselves to be Christians; 90% of Americans say that they believe in God; American government officials go to considerable lengths to publicize their Christian religiosity; and the President has referred to himself as a “born-again” Christian. My Iranian friend’s stereotype of America was by extension a stereotype of western Christianity, perhaps of Christianity itself. It was based upon his experience of “real” Christianity, exemplified by materialism and avarice, and this judgment was delivered from the standpoint of ideal Islam. As a Christian, I cannot accept a Christianity that is privatized and, hence, at its heart selfish. But that is the “ideal me” speaking.

Christians, in turn, maintain their own stereotypes of Islam, reinforced by extremist behavior that is both unfaithful and unrepresentative of the ideals of Islam. The ideal Islam, the ideal you, is something entirely different.

This is, I believe, important background to keep in mind as we examine the topic of this colloquium, a topic that encompasses law, ethics, justice and politics. There is, I will argue an essentialist tendency among both Christians and Muslims to see each other in stereotypical ways when we look at these fundamental concepts. Christians are tempted to see in the centrality of Islamic law a kind of uncompromising rigidity, a legal inertia, that attempts to impose what many in the West call “medieval” concepts on very contemporary realities. They often characterize Islam as a legalistic religion–and this is not a positive designation–in much the same way that some Christians have interpreted Jesus’ critique of the behavior of Jewish authorities in his time as an indication that Jewish legalism has been superseded by Christian love.

I speak here as an admittedly imperfect witness, but one who nevertheless attempts to report faithfully what he has seen and learned from his studies and from Muslim friends, one who does his best to tell the truth about his neighbor. The Islam of my experience is not the unwieldy and unyielding monolith of popular imagination in the West, an imagination that is, by the way, shaped in large part by popular media and by scholars who are ill-disposed to Islam or careless in their work.

What has emerged as a result of such carelessness or manipulative stereotyping is, of course, inconsistent with the rich tradition of Islamic legal theory and practice. It fails to take into account the diversity of Islam, its different legal schools, the rigorous training of religious scholars and the open debate that is an essential part of the training of an ‘alim. It fails to take into account the crucial role of ijtihad, the respect accorded to the mojtahid whose efforts are continually tempered and challenged by other mujtahids and their students. Islamic law is, in my own experience, neither inert nor monolithic; it is dynamic; it is diverse; it is represented by the open door, the open door of ijtihad, of inspired scholarly effort.

Further, when western Christians with whom I have been in conversation have asserted–again under the influence of popular media “analyses”–that Islam is a religion of merciless retribution and unfeeling legalism, I have been compelled to remind them, or inform them, that literally scores of times during an average day Muslims invoke God with God’s two most frequently mentioned attributes. God is rahman and God is rahim. God is merciful and compassionate, and that mercy and compassion are reflected in both the law and in the fulfillment of prescribed religious obligations.

At the same time, Christianity is often characterized and caricatured as a religion that so focuses on the individual that the law, which is by its very nature corporate and societal, is left to the state and its secular mechanisms. This is true neither historically nor, I would argue, theologically. Historically, the church has had its canon laws, which carried full force in many Christian societies. Personal and family law are, for the most part, derived from church law still in many societies where there are substantial numbers of Christians. Even in the most secular of societies, like that of my own country, the United States, what is considered to be secular law has grown out of church law and practice. The founding principle of the country, the very motive for its foundation, is a religious principle, that all people are created equal by God, which is another way of asserting a fundamental religious precept, which is that all of us, equally, are children of God, a precept shared throughout the Abrahamic tradition.

In this very city, John Calvin attempted to shape a political entity that was governed by religious law. To Calvin, a Protestant reformer, just as to the church he sought to reform and from which he broke, there was no sharp bifurcation between politics, law, and religion. They were to him a seamless whole, prompte et sincere in opero Domini, “promptly and sincerely in the work of the Lord.”

Jesus’ own teachings never called for a rejection of the law; quite the contrary he called for a fulfillment of the law, or a perfection of the law in the carrying out of the two great commandments: to love God totally and unreservedly and, the second, to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Jesus introduced, or perhaps simply emphasized, the ethic that should undergird the law and the political order. He taught, and he exemplified in his life and in his death the ethic of love. Law should be the expression of that ethic, not as a static entity, but as a dynamic living organism that is responsive both to societal changes and to the continuing efforts by committed people of faith to discern God’s will. The Pilgrim John Robinson, one of the forebears of my own Christian denomination, put it this way, “For I am confident the Lord has more truth and light yet to break forth from his Holy Word.” This is, I believe, another way of saying that the door of ijtihad must be open for Christians as well as for Muslims.

Christianity, despite what many Christians have made of it, is neither privatistic nor is it apolitical. When Jesus assured his followers that “whenever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am also,” he was not simply praising the power of small groups; he was also insisting that worship of God and the faithful carrying out of God’s will is incomplete if it does not have a quorum of more than one, that community is an essential aspect of religion. And when he answered a trick question posed by a hostile legal scholar about religious and temporal authority with the phrase, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” his statement is only comprehensible when considered against the background of Jesus own religious context, one in which a fundamental understanding is that the earth is the Lord’s in its totality.

For Christians in contemporary society, and I would suggest for Muslims as well, the compelling question is not whether they are to participate in the political order as people of faith, and on the basis of that faith; the question is how they should participate and what should be the content of their participation. A further question, which pays respect to the reality of religious pluralism, is how shall the law be formulated in a way that does not abridge the rights of those from other religious traditions, people who are also striving to carry out the will of God in their individual lives and in their own participation in society. A political setting that respects religious diversity, that is not secular in the sense that it attempts to suppress religion, but rather interprets religious diversity as a possible source of morality and spiritual strength, I would argue, can be the basis of a faithful society. Such a setting places a premium on conscious moral choice over against unreflective obedience. Contemporary Christians may no longer strive toward the creation of a Calvinist republic, or a Christendom united under the aegis of the church, but, if they are faithful, they are compelled to seek the realization of the kingdom of God here on earth, having before them always Jesus’ prayer that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The mode of that political participation will vary, but its goal will be consistent.

If law rests on the moral basis of ethics, its goal is the realization of justice, of right relationships between people in society, people in community. Laws that are not moored in ethics and that do not have justice as a goal can become the tool of the powerful to suppress the weak and the poor. Our current international order, which reinforces inequality and injustice, which entrusts lawmaking to those whose interests are not in justice but in the accumulation of wealth and power, is not an order at all, but rather is the disorder of the survival of the fittest under the thin veneer of a contrived legality. All people of faith are called to challenge this unjust status quo.

But even justice is itself subject to the demands of the ethic of love–love of God, love of God’s creation. Jesus, in consistently pointing out the insufficiency of law that is not grounded in the ethic of love continually challenged his own co-religionists: “you have heard it said . . .but I say.” Each time, he told his followers that they must go beyond the letter of the law, that they must challenge contemporary understandings of justice in order to meet the exacting demands of divine justice, a justice that is always tempered by God’s essential mercy and compassion.

It is important that we Muslims and Christians talk with each other about these things. Not just our co-existence, but our very existence, may depend on it. Ours is an age when people are realizing that humanity is, indeed, flawed, that people need that spiritual dimension that places humans above even the angels, that makes us children of God and not self-interested competitors. I am convinced that our own traditions, with all their differences, have something to say to the contemporary condition, that we can together point toward a world that is under the sway of God’s justice, a justice that is founded on the ethic of love, established by a God who is rahman and rahim, merciful and compassionate.

Dr Dale L. Bishop, who is Professor at Hartford, gave this paper at World Council of Churches/Iranian Religious Leadership Consultation, on 26-27 September, 2005, in Geneva, Switzerland.

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