Interfaith Dialogue
A personal account
When I started university, ‘interfaith dialogue’ was one of many abstract issues related to my faith that worried me. I was raised a white, middle-middle class Methodist. My only interfaith encounter had been with a Sikh kid at my primary school who struck me as a very nice feller, although I never plucked up the courage to interrogate him about his hairstyle. I was, and to a large extent still am, ignorant. When my faith started becoming more important to me, ‘interfaith dialogue’, as an abstract concept, seemed dubious. I suspect that my subconscious feelings ran something like this: if what I believe is right, I don’t need to listen to other faiths; I run the risk of being misled.
God in his mercy did not allow me to stay in this state of religious insecurity. One of the first friends I made at university was of the Baha’i faith, and our friendship became very important to me. This friendship has had the effect of making me face up to the fact that for people of other faiths, their faith is as important to them as my faith in Jesus is to me. For my friend, the Baha’i faith is as much a part of her identity as Christianity is a part of mine.
I realise this sounds obvious. However, for me at least, there is a world of difference between knowing something abstractly and knowing something personally. In the context of my new friendship, sweeping the ‘interfaith issue’ under the psychological carpet was no longer an option. The friendship also had pressing implications for how I understood my own faith. Disturbingly, it wasn’t just the differences in our faiths that were causing me to think more deeply; the similarities were, if anything, affecting me even more. A deeply significant moment for me was at the summit of the highest peak in Yorkshire, looking out over the Dales and becoming acutely aware that my friend and I were both worshipping our creator God, spontaneously and silently. It’s hard to overstate what this felt like personally; closeness with God, closeness with my friend, all barriers down, freedom. This experience cuts through a lot of the abstract theologising I do on interfaith relations and seems to communicate to me at a dee per level; it’s an experience I have yet to fully reconcile with my thinking about my faith. Certainly at the time it strengthened and confirmed my need (call?) to start thinking through interfaith issues more deeply.
Through my friend, I’ve become (at first somewhat reluctantly) involved in the fledgling campus Interfaith Society. There I’ve gained a clearer understanding of what Judaism, Islam, the Baha’i faith, Buddhism and Paganism are about to individual followers. The concrete realities of these faiths bear almost no resemblance to the simplified and usually partially fictitious representations of them that I found I had been carrying around in my head. These faiths are still mysterious to me, but at least some of my prejudices, and my tendency to simplify, are being wiped away and I’m beginning to see more clearly. Any believer in Christ will say that there’s a world of difference between studying Christianity in RE and following Christ in the day to day. They’re just two different things. Why should any other faith be different? If you want to even begin to understand a faith, you have to try your best to look at it from a believer’s eye view.
Of course the question remains: “why bother?”. An immediate, self-interested response follows from what I’ve already written; if I’m not prepared to make a genuine effort to listen to what other people have to say about God, why should others be expected to listen to me? For a Christian witness to be credible in a multi-cultural and multi-faith society it cannot afford to stand back and shout from a distance. Dialogue is the key, not monologue — Christians have to listen as well as speak.
I have come to believe, however, that this reasoning is not by itself enough for a mutually respectful dialogue. It’s true, but it shouldn’t be the sole motivation for Christians to engage in interfaith dialogue. It would mean our listening was not true listening; it would be a smokescreen to allow us to say our piece, the equivalent of someone smiling and nodding at you whilst thinking about what they’re going to say next. Real listening, as I understand it, includes the possibility that what the other person is saying will affect us and change us. It is in that sense inherently risky.
A Christianity that thinks it has the monopoly on truth cannot ever learn to listen. We can, of course, go through life with earmuffs on and avoid dealing with anything that challenges our comfortable ‘Christian identity’. I do not believe that this is Christ-like. Jesus listened — really listened — to people who, in the mentality of his culture, were unlikely carriers of faith and truth. As a Jew, he was amazed at the faith of Gentiles (such as in Luke 7:1–10). Whatever we make of the controversial account of Jesus’ conversation with the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7:24–30, it seems to me that the story makes plain that truth about God is not always carried through the expected and authorised channels. Here it is the Gentile woman who has the punch-line, not Jesus! The Church universal is the body of the risen Christ; how do we bear witness to his radical humility, his willingness to step out of his comfort zone and start listening and speaking?
Starting to listen to other faiths doesn’t mean sacrificing our own. (For example, I try to remember to pray to God in Christ before and after interfaith meetings; the meetings aren’t separate from my prayer life or some kind of ‘bolted on’ extra to what I do the rest of the week). It does mean almost inevitably that we will start to look at our faith differently, gaining insights into it that we wouldn’t receive any other way. For me, interfaith encounters have forced me to continually think and study, talk and pray through things that I originally took as rote; what salvation is, personal salvation, evangelism, scriptural authority, the work of the Holy Spirit, and more. Most of these huge issues are still theological work in progress and well out of the scope of this article! Rather than looking at this as a dangerous side effect of interfaith encounters — I’ve certainly never felt under any outside compulsion to change any of my beliefs — I’m beginning to see continual re-evaluation of belief as vit al in my growth as a Christian. A belief unchallenged and half-believed isn’t worth having. I know I have a tendency to laziness with this process, but I suspect if I operated solely in the Christian ghetto I would be much worse.
What continues to take me by surprise is that God has used my interfaith encounters, through this process of questioning and re-evaluating my beliefs, to genuinely enrich, deepen and strengthen my shaky faith in Him. By trying to listen to others and putting my faith in the context of very different beliefs, I find I have a new, securer and more grateful awareness of my own dependence on the grace I find in Jesus Christ; I find it draws me back to the centre of my faith.
Your time at university is a unique opportunity to easily meet and engage in dialogue with people of faiths other than your own. Use it — you’ll find there’s nothing to fear.