EDITORS’ PAGE

Taking Stock

 

Dividing time into decades is not the best approach when exploring history, for the real world of people, events and cultural change is not sub-ject to any easy desire for analytical tidiness. Nevertheless, it can act as a convenient fiction for monitoring pat-terns of shifting interests and priorities in what we consider to be significant. That said, my question is: what has been happening over four decades of interreligious work?

The 1970s. The world began to look like a global village, the fragility of which was forcefully symbolised in “Moonrise” and the first iconic pictures of the earth from space. The religions were intuiting the end of their self-sufficiency and lan-guage about interconnection was every-where awakening: there was global this and global that.

The 1980s. Theologies and philoso-phies wrestling with plurality emerged in earnest, as the age-old problem of the “one and the many” was cast again in a new context. If religious exclusivism no longer fitted reality, what could take its place? Particular religions spoke of universal sacredness, but that sacredness might speak with unfamiliar tones. Religions were not the same, obviously; equally inescapable, however, was the recognition that the religions could well belong together within some relationship of family resemblance. This was the decade of “seeking unity”.

The 1990s. Permission for inter-religious interaction and cooperation at every level had been granted. Dialogue took off as an umbrella term and aimed at learning “about”, “with” and “from” the unfamiliar other. Interfaith relations emerged as an attempted value-neu-tral space which suspended belief about issues of ideological superiority of one religion over another. This was a decade for “maintaining difference”.

2000+. The spectre of religiously-motivated violence burst the balloon of any complacency about dialogue and cooperation. Both the exploratory the-ologies/philosophies of the other and the tentative dialogical relations with the other were confronted with the shadow side of religion. Some said this is why inter-religious work exists: to curb our religions’ inherent mistrust of and potential violence towards the ones who are different. Others said that violence is an aberration and not the true face of religious commitment, and therefore the interreligious movement should not let violence distract the whole of its attention. Some secularist voices said: “Away with the whole lot”.

So where are we now? Let me offer two brief reflections.

First, the arising of theological/ philosophical reflection about plural-ity in the 1980s and the arising of dialogue in the 1990s has left an unre-solved issue between them. One decade concentrated on “shared values and beliefs” and the next on “disconti-nuities between traditions”: in other words, samenesses and differences. Any hoped for “transcendent unity of reli-gions” from one decade came under suspicion during the next. The essential unspoken question is whether or not traditions might give up their claims to that inherent superiority which stems from latent exclusivism at their core. Without that surrender it is hard to see how the dialogue enterprise can con-tinue its integrity. The oft-heard phrase “let’s dialogue in earnest, but don’t expect us to water-down our religion” is a symptom of the fear that may be involved. But the caution inherent in such a phrase misses the spirit of what is involved. All the developing wisdom about dialogue suggests that openness to what the other offers relies on a more generous kind of expectation.

Second, once the agonising over religiously-motivated violence has been thoroughly gone over, we are left asking: what kind of actors on the world stage do religions want to be? The suspicion from the secularist minded that violence really does lurk within religious commit-ment in its purest forms is not without foundation, much as it pains the ordi-nary believer to hear so. If the religions desire to be actors on the world stage then the secularist critique deserves a hearing. The interreligious movement is poised with the proposal of a dialogical model as a positive and achievable way forward, both for overcoming ancient antagonisms between religions and for avoiding a potentially new opposition, a stand-off this time between the ‘reli-gions’ and the ‘secularists’. It is time to create a sense of mutual accountability between religious voices and between those voices and the secular world.

Without doubt, there is much inter-religious cooperation – in thought and action – to be getting on with. Perhaps a final quotation extracted from the Kyoto Declaration of the eighth world assembly of Religions for Peace can act as a spur to us:

There are religious and ethical imper­atives for multi-religious cooperation to resist and reject violence, prevent it when possible, as well as promote reconciliation and healing. Our religious traditions call us to care for one another and to treat the problems faced by others as our own.

(See p. 80 for the full Statement of the Kyoto Declaration).

Alan Race