The Editor's Page

Dialogue is All

During the last 50 years the idea that the religions should be in dialogue has come of age. The significance of this truly evolutionary transition may yet have to unfold more fully before us, but the energy within the dialogical movement is gaining momentum every day. Truly, it feels as though we are living through a period of momentous transition.

There are many reasons why dialogue has come to occupy the centre ground of religious discussion and concern. Some of these stem from the sheer fact that we are neighbours now to one another as never before and neighbours have to find ways of living together in harmony. Other motivations for dialogue are to do with international affairs and the necessity to understand the tenacity of religious worldviews

if we are to move into a peaceful global future. Then there are religious reasons for dialogue: the heady thought that we might comprehend reality more fully if we sincerely try to look out on the world through the eyes of the other who is both stranger and companion.

If interreligious dialogue opens up new opportunities and responsibilities it also harbours implications for the religions themselves. As dialogue proceeds best on the basis of trustful acceptance, critical friendship and mutual accountability, we also know that these qualities have scarcely been the hallmarks of interreligious encounters through the centuries! Therefore, my contention is that, as a result of dialogical encounter and practice, our religious identities themselves will be reshaped. Let me outline three key elements at the heart of dialogue in order to illustrate what I mean.

1. DIALOGUE IS WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS FROM THE RELIGIONS

Calls for Dialogue have often begun with reference to crisis. The world is in desperate trouble and so we need co-operation on as many fronts as we can muster to tackle the problems. What has become interesting about this approach is that often those who would normally operate within a secular discourse are now beginning to reach out to the religions. From the pragmatic perspective of the world's leaders, analysts and institutional shapers, there is a growing recognition that perhaps the religions have more to offer than the violence with which they are associated in the popular mind. The resources of spirituality, transcendence and rootedness in human community are being pitted against the dominance of purely political or economist models of human living. For example, Richard Falk, who has been a long-time analyst of international affairs and advocate of social and spiritual values in global thinking, has written:

Without religious identity, prospects for global humane governance are without any social or political foundation; and more importantly, they are without the spiritual character that can mobilize and motivate on a basis that is far more powerful than what the market, secular reason, and varieties of nationalism have to offer.

The point seems to be simply that the values which are embedded in our varied religious visions are perennial and are a considerable part of what motivate people at the levels of community and cultural identity. However, if the religions are to be welcomed at the table of international affairs then it will have to be on a dialogical basis.

No one tradition can peddle the whole truth. The religions will have to face some uncomfortable truths, chief among them being that they have historically all too readily labelled the other as enemy and generated reasons for destroying them. Today's religious extremists can easily find texts of terror to which they can appeal. Therefore, if the religions are to respond to the invitation to join the discussions of what kind of world we want for the future, it has to be on the basis of a dialogue that renounces religion-sponsored violence

2. DIALOGUE IS WHAT THE RELIGIONS AT THEIR BEST POTENTIALLY OFFER THE WORLD

Religions provide ethical frameworks, binding beliefs and a sense of human solidarity in community. They promote values such as justice, peace, empathy with the suffering, friendship with the stranger, and connectedness to the earth. In a dialogical setting, the question arises how to cross-pollinate the ethical resourcefulness of the traditions. This opens door to global ethic thinking. One exercise in harnessing ethical resourcefulness was offered in the global ethic thinking of the statement Declaration Toward a Global Ethic, first promulgated at the 1993 Parliament of World's Religions. This is not the only example of global ethic thinking, but it has received the most discussion. It is worth recalling the Four Commitments that lay at the heart of the Parliament's Global Ethic statement:

a) Commitment to a culture of nonviolence and respect for life.
b) Commitment to a culture of solidarity and a just economic order.
c) Commitment to a culture of tolerance and a life of truthfulness.
d) Commitment to a culture of equal rights and partnership between men and women.

These four Commitments provide sufficient substance for the religions to have themselves a dialogical field day! Moreover, they provide for a substantial critique of much of the destructive effects of human behaviour. They propel the religions and other worldviews into patterns of relationship that will transform the outlook of all of us.

But there is more. We also open ourselves up to challenges from critical reasoning and the democratic spirit. This entails that the values of equality, human rights and human responsibilities, the scientific search for truth in understanding the way the world works, looking hard at the ambivalence of religious texts and traditions towards violence - these cumulatively exact a price to be paid for signing up with a Global Ethic!

3. DIALOGUE REPRESENTS A MOMENTOUS SHIFT IN RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS

Let me propose a form of words here which is deliberately bold. It is this: “There can be no one religion without 'the others'.”

By this I mean that I cannot know who I am by reference to the basic experience at the origins of my tradition alone. I am accepting the need for what one advocate of dialogue has called “epistemological modesty”. In other words, we cannot equate the whole of what there is to know about ultimate reality - God, the Divine, Transcendence - whatever term we choose - with what is known in one tradition alone. “Epistemological modesty” is the opposite of absolutism in philosophy and theological explanations of religious experience.

In terms of my proposal we are compelled to say that, for example, Buddhism is not superior to Hinduism; Christianity is not superior to Judaism; Islam is not superior to Sikhism, and so on. This is not to say that there is nothing disagreeable in each of these traditions. If dialogue means that anything goes in religious understanding then I am against it. But if it means that everyone has something to offer and no-one has nothing to offer then I am for it.

Of course there are disagreements between religions. Dialogue is about seeking out what is considered best in the light of tradition and contemporary knowledge. Each developed tradition is founded on an insight that is fragmentary. And it is of the essence of human nature that no human bring or group can grasp the whole of ultimate truth in one sitting, so to speak. I do not mean that each grasps a part of a whole, as though we were each parts of a jig-saw puzzle and the puzzle is only complete when each has submitted its unique shape. The situation is that each glimpses the whole but does so partially. We each have our uniquenesses, our particular histories, scriptures and patterns of cultural expressions. But we are each also flawed and this too emerges through dialogue. We each need “the other” in order to be ourselves. There can be no one religion without “the others”. I once said that each tradition reserves a corner of the mind for its own eventual superiority. That corner of the mind must now be given up. For how else can we enter a dialogical future?

From now on text and tradition require careful handling. They cannot be used in a simplistic way. There can be no room for dogmatic certainties (though I am aware that that sentence itself could be construed as its own dogmatic certainty!). Above all, attitudes and practices and interpretations that fall below what we now recognise as essential to human dignity, and even essential to the dignity of the earth itself, should not be sanctioned.

FOUR CHALLENGES FOR THE DIALOGUE MOVEMENT

In conclusion, I believe that those of us who value the interreligious dialogue movement have to face at least four challenges. These are as follows:

1) We should develop models of interreligious encounter which are not only multireligious but also multidisciplinary.
2) Religious tradition must learn to adapt to the best of modern knowledge.
3) There is a desperate need to focus on the needs of the whole world and not just on our bit of the whole.
4) Tolerance of the other helps a process to begin, but interreligious dialogue calls us to move beyond tolerance to mutual interaction and mutual critique.

Permission for dialogue has been hard won, but it is now established in principle. The next phase is for us all to harvest the fruits of dialogue. Nevertheless, opposition will continue. Some of this opposition is made on the grounds that dialogue assumes that all religions are really the same underneath their outward symbolism and cultural packaging. But this argument is bogus. Dialogue takes place in the space between the assumption that “we're all the same” and the insistence that “we're all different”.

Plainly, we are not all the same - the religions have different origins, historical trajectories, spiritualities and so on. Yet neither are we all different in the sense of being confined to sealed off rooms. We inhabit one earth and we have powers to exercise human empathy across many boundaries. Believers from whatever tradition participate in the search for transcendent vision and accompanying human transformation, no matter how that vision and transformation has been shaped symbolically and worked out in practice. If we were all the same there would be no need to talk to one another; if we were incommensurably different there would be no need to do any talking!

Let us move into the future boldly - proud of what has been achieved so far, yet aware of the need to deepen our grasp of the challenges emanating from the processes of dialogue itself.

Alan Race