Transcript
Maybe we'll get started. On Friday I talked about the gospel and the religions and I reviewed, I tried just for the benefit of those of you who were not able to be here on Friday, I began by trying to make the point that when we look at the relation of the gospel and the religions we cannot pretend to have a standpoint which is above all standpoints that we can of course look at the question of the
relations between the religions from a point of view outside the religions such as for example from the point of view of rationalism as in the eighteenth century or from the point of view of political necessities as in the Empire of Akbar or we can look from the point of view of one of the religious commitments and I suggested the ways in which a Muslim, a Hindu, a Marxist will look at Christianity and I indicated that as
a Christian I could look at the other religions only from the point of view of my ultimate commitment as a Christian. I then indicated some of the different ways in which Christians have tried to assert, to assess, to understand the other religions and I finished with something that was expressed in the form of a little dialogue, a little diagram with the steps down and steps up and the cross in the middle and I suggested something which
I hope expresses the essence of what I would want to say namely that we enter into the meeting with those of other faiths from a point of view which acknowledges the cross or which to put it more fully acknowledges the total fact of Jesus Christ incarnate, crucified and risen as the central reality with which all men must deal that my Christianity is something which is subject to revision, to correction, my Christianity is not the final truth
but I enter into this meeting with those of other faiths from the point of view of the faith that the ultimate truth will be found in Jesus Christ but I remain ready to learn from my partner of another faith more than I have learned about Jesus. I could give perhaps one very good example of that that I didn't mention last week the great Christian missionary and saint C.F. Andrews who was a very very close friend and
colleague of Mahatma Gandhi and who always said that it was Gandhi who taught him to understand the Sermon on the Mount and certainly Andrews understanding of Jesus and he remained a man totally committed to Jesus Christ to the end of his life. Gandhi's understanding of Jesus and Andrews understanding of Jesus was undoubtedly profoundly deepened by his very close and intimate and long-standing association with Gandhi and one could give other illustrations. Well now in this talk
I gave the title Dialogue, Interfaith Dialogue. I would like to set that in the broader context which I think is what concerns people involved in the Church's mission. The relation of dialogue to the whole question of evangelism and conversion because this has been a great subject of debate and one of the issues that is debated in these papers that we look at after coffee you'll see how much emotion surrounds the question of dialogue seen as a
kind of alternative to conversion or evangelism. I would like since I'm going to use the word evangelism several times in this lecture just to stop for a moment on a point of definition. Evangelism is a word that is used in different senses. There are what one might call two main ways of using the word, a broad way and a narrow way. The broad way is prepared to include in evangelism all kinds of activities which are in
some way in some form Christian witness but are not specifically actually communicating a message about Jesus. I think it is better to use evangelism in the narrower sense to say that evangelism means actually telling a story. It means naming the name of Jesus. It's a communication which involves words, either spoken words or written words. Now to say that then means that evangelism is not the duty of the church because the whole duty of the church is
not words. Sometimes you read statements which suggest that evangelism is the whole duty of the church. Well in that sense you're using evangelism in a very broad sense so that it becomes almost meaningless. I think it is better to use evangelism in a narrower sense that it is an activity which involves communicating the name of Jesus in words and therefore to say that means that it is not the whole duty of the church because the church
has to do many other things besides using words. That's just so that it is clear what I mean when I talk about evangelism. If one can take off from this point it is obvious that if you use words we are in the business of communication and everyone involved in the business of communication knows that what is spoken is not always the same as what is heard. That what is heard is always shaped by the situation of
the hearer and that in fact what is heard is often very different from what is spoken. So communication can never be just a monologue, at least not effective communication. There are some people, some friends of mine in India who think that they are doing their duty as evangelists when they go out into the street with a loud hailer and stand in the street and say God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son
etc. just as a kind of announcement into the street. But one would not have to take long talking to the people standing in the street to discover that that was not communicating in any significant what you want to communicate. And I think it is worth stressing this point because during the past 200 or 250 years we have identified evangelism so much with an activity carried out by the strong, the rich, the educated, the powerful towards the
weak, the poor, the uneducated, the marginal. And therefore we have become accustomed to a kind of monological evangelism in which we shout or print our message in which we construct powerful radio stations which can carry to the limits of the earth and we think that if we put more megawatts into the radio station we will get more evangelism. Well this is surely an illusion and communication is always a two-way business and we delude ourselves when
we imagine that simply by shouting or by printing millions of or by constructing powerful radio transmitters we are going to communicate. And therefore perhaps especially because we are conscious of the fact that we are now at the end of this colonial era the concept of dialogue has moved much more into the centre of the picture. We are more ready now to recognize that there is need for a kind of humble apostolate which is more along the
lines of St. Paul's than along the lines of the high-power commercially modeled sales program that sometimes goes under the name of evangelism. I think for example of words of St. Paul in Second Corinthians. No I'm thinking of First Corinthians, sorry First Corinthians 2 when he speaks of his own ministry. When I came to you brethren I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. I decided to know nothing
among you except Jesus Christ and Him and I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling and my speech and my message were not implausible with words of wisdom but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. And in the second letter to the Corinthians the fourth chapter where he speaks of our having this treasure in earthen
vessels so that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us and then you have this famous picture we are afflicted but not crushed perplexed but not driven to despair persecuted but not struck down but not destroyed. The truly apostolic picture of an evangelist is not that of a high power salesman who is so to speak bulldozing his hearers but rather a humble apostolate of one who bears in his body the marks of Jesus but
I think that there is also a further reason why the idea of dialogue has moved into the centre of missionary thinking and that is that we have all been influenced by the insight that is very specially associated with the of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. The truth is known in dialogue. The famous book of Martin Buber published between the wars, Ich und Du, I and Thou, a small book. I think the English translation just runs to
about 25-30 pages maybe more than that but it's a very small book but it was an epoch-making book, I and Thou. It simply opened up what I suppose once you've said it is obvious but yet it's always the obvious things that are the great discoveries that whereas the typical development of European thought from the Renaissance onwards had been from the point of view of the subject discovering a world of objects, exploration, research, experimentation, exploitation,
the subject which is in control whether the scientist working at his laboratory bench or the scholar working at his desk with his books at his disposal. It is this subject which is in control. He decides what book to consult, what experiment to make, what line to pursue. He is the master in a world which may resist him but which cannot answer back, which is ultimately passive under his probing and researching. This world of I and it,
as Buber calls it, has been the world in which European man lived at least from the Renaissance onwards and Buber points out that there is another world, the world of I and Thou in which I am confronted with one who can answer back, one who can put questions to me, who can probe me, one who can refuse to answer my questions, one whom I cannot know unless he reveals himself to me, that there is a final
limit. If you refuse to, as we say, open up to me, if you refuse to open your heart to me, I could put you on the operating table and dissect you but I still would not be able to know you. You only can reveal yourself to me and at this point I am a limited subject. I have to confess that I cannot know at all unless you reveal yourself to me. So truth, as Buber says, truth
in its deepest sense is known only in dialogue. Truth is personal encounter. The name of a famous book of Emil Brunner called Wahrheit als Begegnung, Truth as Encounter, which develops this insight in the field of Christian theology and this has very deeply influenced, I think, our own time so that all of these factors, the ending of the colonial period of missions, the recognition of the dialogical nature of communication, the insight about truth being known in dialogue,
all of these things have brought dialogue to the fore in missionary thinking and therefore the question arises, how do we understand the role of interfaith dialogue in the whole mission of the church? And of course, as we shall see after coffee among conservative evangelicals and not only among them, there is a very profound suspicion of dialogue that it is felt to be, as indeed it could be, a betrayal of the essential Christian commission, go and preach
the gospel to all creatures. I think that there are three presuppositions that are sometimes entertained which we cannot accept. There is first of all presupposition that the purpose of dialogue is to uncover the essence of all the religions. During our early years in India, when we lived in the town of Kanchipuram, which is a very famous old Hindu centre, I used to spend a couple of hours every Wednesday evening for four years or so in the
Ramakrishna Mission monastery discussing the Hindu and Christian scriptures with Hindu scholars and I always remember how in the early days of these discussions, they took it for granted that the purpose of dialogue was that we would look at the Hindu and Christian scriptures and we would find a sort of common essence that is the real truth within them both. Now that as I see it, it is not the presupposition of Christian dialogue or a very similar
idea that one is seeking some kind of synthesis of all the religions, that one is going to bring together valuable elements in all the religions to seek some kind of a synthesis or thirdly that in dialogue the religions are being treated as factors in the development of the nation or the world. What can Christianity contribute to the solution of our problems? What can Hinduism contribute to? That has a valid place I think in dialogue but it
cannot be the ultimate presupposition of dialogue. Here we come to this very difficult question of the relationship between commitment and openness. I think this is a very difficult question to answer. Very often when one gets into this kind of discussion people say but surely you must go into dialogue with an open mind to which I always reply yes but not open at both ends. A mind which is open at both ends cannot retain anything at all
and it's an illusion to imagine that we ever have a totally open mind. A totally open mind would be the mind of an imbecile. A mind, any mind that is capable of coherent speech has already been formed by certain commitments, certain we already have our own understanding of what we will regard as evidence, what we will regard as proof of what will be the probable directions in which we look for illumination. Every single one of us
enters into a discussion with an already formed mind otherwise we would be incapable of speech. But of course there is also a feedback we receive from another and as we receive from another we have to look again at our own fundamental presuppositions and see how far they have to be modified. And of course there can be the total process which we call conversion where your whole basic model is destroyed and you are led to adopt a
totally new model which is what we call conversion. But it is an illusion to imagine that you enter into a dialogue with a totally open mind. You cannot enter into a dialogue except on the basis of certain commitments which you already have. And I would understand the Christians approach to dialogue as being not that my understanding of Christianity is final. This is subject to modification. I am prepared and expect to learn that I have been too,
that my understanding of Christianity has been distorted in various ways. But I do enter into dialogue on the basis of the that it is by understanding Jesus Christ better that I shall understand the truth and that therefore in the process of dialogue I am like that diagram that I gave. I am coming down to the bottom of the step ladder of the staircase and meeting my brother of another faith at that point at the of the
staircase but that is also the place where I meet the cross and it is there that I learn from my brother. My friend Professor John Hick who has written a paper recently published a paper criticizing what I have written about dialogue speaks of a kind of spectrum at one end of which there is what he calls the confessional approach to dialogue and at the other end there is what he calls the truth-seeking approach to dialogue
and he says that while there must be a certain confessional element that the primary emphasis in dialogue must be truth-seeking but his own paper in which he defends that position makes it very clear that in fact this is this is not a true picture. I think perhaps I quoted this did I earlier his phrase about it is obvious that transcendent being must be greater than any vision of it. I mean this is the ground on
which he it is obvious that transcendent being must be greater than any particular expression of it and by that he justifies his view that a dialogue must be a truth-seeking dialogue but that sentence itself already shows that by truth he already means something which he calls transcendent being and one has to ask then what does this word transcendent being mean. He himself is therefore already entering the dialogue with a preformed decision about what kind of
thing it will be which is found namely something which can conform to his concept of transcendent being. So that I think this is an illusory way of speaking of dialogue I think we can only go into dialogue on the basis of a commitment but I think that the Christian goes into dialogue on the basis of his commitment to Jesus Christ not to his own particular grasp of Jesus Christ and I would claim here the teaching of
our Lord himself in John 16 and this is perhaps a text for what I want to say perhaps at the end we can come back to this text and see whether I am truly interpreting it. John 16:12 to 15 Jesus said I have yet many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now when the spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all the truth for he will not speak on his
own authority but whatever he hears he will speak and he will declare to you the things that are to come he will glorify me for he will take what is mine and declare it to you all that the Father has is mine therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. Now you see what is being said there is that the whole of the truth cannot be grasped by this group
of men in this room at this moment they are a group of Jews of the first century whose minds are formed by the cultural religious tradition in which they have been formed and in one sense a of God has been made to them because in the next chapter Jesus says I have made known to them thy name. So that the whole riches of the world belong to Jesus and the work of the Spirit will be to
things to the church and I believe that this is the deepest way of understanding the mission of the church it is as Paul puts it the process by which we bring every thought into captivity to Christ or as we have it in Ephesians 1:10 by which all things are summed up in Christ and the mission of the church as I see it the church going out to meet the different cultures and faiths of mankind the
different experiences of mankind which have shaped different ways of understanding the truth that as the church goes out with the gospel to meet these it is the work of the and this I would see being foreshadowed in the conversion of Cornelius where it is shown to the church so to speak that the Gentile world also belongs to Christ and through the ministry of the implications of this have to be worked out so that we go into
the dialogue in the faith that because all things that the Father has belong to Jesus that he is in fact the King and head of the that it will be the work of the Spirit to take them and declare them to us which means that we have still to learn we have still much to learn but what we learn will be a showing to us of all the riches of the Father's world as being belonging to
Christ and it will be the work of the Spirit to teach us that and so you see I have already given a sort of Trinitarian structure to what I'm wanting to say and that is the structure that I shall follow in seeking to deal with this question of dialogue interfaith dialogue this structure means that we participate in dialogue first of all as the children of the one Father who is the Lord of all and who wills
to be the Father of all the one God who has made all men in his image who is unceasingly at work in the lives of all mankind who is guiding world history to its true goal we meet as those who belong to one God even though we may understand him differently so that means at least three things it means that we are eager to listen to our partners so that we may receive from them what God
has given to them all that the Father has is mine and surely we are blind if we do not recognize the wonderful gifts that God has given to people of other faiths one could begin to suggest that in many different ways but I won't spend time doing so the second implication is that we are meeting in in a shared world a context of a shared context of things I have emphasized this point several times last week
that the human life which is the object of God's loving concern is the real human life which we live in communication with one another as part of a world of things the world of nature the creative world and I pointed out the distortions that I think arise when we try to isolate the world of I thou from the world of I it I think this is the defect of that book of Brunner which I mentioned those
of you who have read the divine human encounter in English translation I think that Brunner makes that mistake he regards so for example the institutional structure of the church as irrelevant to the real feeling of God with the human soul and that lands him I think in a lot of ultimately nonsense but it arises from the attempt to have this world of I thou apart from the world of I it we meet our partners of another
faith within a shared world of things which we all share together the world things is in a certain sense the same for all of us and the third implication is that we meet at a particular time and place in the ongoing history of the world a history which we believe to be the providential rule of God I spoke earlier of these dialogues we used to have in my young days in Kanchipuram we didn't use the word
dialogue then nobody everybody talks about dialogue now we just talked about conversations then and and I think that this I think that this dialogue itself is an indication of our failure if we were really living in the right relationship with people of other faiths we wouldn't talk about dialogue at all we don't talk about dialogue with our next-door neighbors we just we're just human beings with them and we talk to each other and listen to
each other and and we don't sort of screw ourselves up and say go to I'm going to have a dialogue with my next-door neighbor the very word dialogue is an indication of something wrong I think I wish we could drop the word it's simply ordinary human relationships with with our fellow human beings and to come back to my point I spoke about these dialogues these conversations that we had in Kanchipuram where we were meeting as
religious people in a religious institution a Hindu monastery studying the scriptures of our religions and meeting one another as the representatives of different religious traditions now that has value and I learned a great deal from that but when we were in Madras I was involved in a quite different kind of dialogue where we had outstanding representatives of different faiths including also Marxists and secularists to discuss the living issues of national life for example the one that
we had was about secularism and social justice does a secular society have within itself what it takes to bring about justice does it need religion if it is to be just or is religion something that works against justice well now there we had Hindus Muslims Gandhians Marxists humanists and so forth trying to grapple with these issues and here we could not do as we did in the Ramakrishna mission fall back on our scriptures and simply quote
our official doctrinal positions because the Bible itself does not have a discussion on that issue we are forced out to the frontiers of our faith where we are ourselves struggling to find the answers that is true of Christians of Hindus of Muslims and everybody we are we cannot just fall back on our own dogmatic statements from several centuries ago we have to come out to our frontiers to the place where we ourselves are facing questions about
which we ourselves differ and there you have a kind of living meeting of people in their real situations and I think this is a more fruitful kind of because it's a it's a dialogue in which our hearts are really opened up to each other we really meet one another in our weakness and not just in our strength but we are meeting one another in the context of our seeking for obedience to God in the actual events
of history in which were involved our nation the history of our city whatever it might be and that of course that kind of dialogue may often lead into some kind of common action in which we can collaborate with people of other faiths in some common action that's for the good of our society so that's my first point we meet as those who are the creatures of one Lord the children of one father but secondly we participate
in the dialogue as members in the body of Christ as members in this body sent into the world by the father to continue the mission of Jesus as the father sent me so I send you and that has three consequences it means first of all that we are vulnerable Jesus communicated the good news of the kingdom not by standing apart from men and lecturing to them from the sky so to speak but by taking our humanity
upon him by being tempted and as we know especially from the temptation story by being tempted by the messianism of his time the story of the temptations is the story of Jesus being tempted by the religion of his time if you like the messianism of contemporary Judaism Jesus gave himself to be totally exposed to men in their religion as in their politics and so also we give ourselves to be exposed we are vulnerable because we we
open ourselves up a real meeting with a man of another faith must mean that we are so to him that his way of looking at things becomes a real possibility for me I don't think that one has really heard the message of one of the great religions of the world if one has not also been moved by it one has not in a certain sense been tempted by it I remember one of these meetings that I'm
speaking of in Madras and at the end of it a very distinguished Hindu philosopher professor T. Krishnamachari professor of philosophy at that time in Madras a Brahmin he turned to me at the end of it and he said this is not real dialogue I know what real dialogue is it is and I thought that that was a very interesting remark and one has not really entered into dialogue if one has not felt the force of the
other position with which one is dealing and I think the true disciple will follow Jesus at this point by being wholly exposed and vulnerable as Jesus was or if you like to put it in the form of the model that I gave the Christian has to come down to the bottom of the stairway to meet his partner much of the intellectual constructions the practices of my Christianity may have to be put in question when my partner
meets me at that but that is the point at which I can also claim afresh the forgiveness and the guidance of Jesus and I think that the implication of that also is that the Christian who engages in dialogue should be one who is firmly rooted in his own faith in his own the life of his church in the regular life of devotion of the word and the sacraments the sharing in the Eucharist and so on I
said earlier that religion is the area of demonic powers there are demonic powers in the world of the religions and I think it is foolish to enter into these kinds of meetings unless one is taking with the deepest seriousness one's own membership one's own participation in the continuing life of the church it is only by being deeply rooted in Christ that one can enter in complete self emptying and with complete exposure into this meeting with those
of other faiths where we may bear witness to Christ and thirdly we participate in the faith and expectation that the Holy Spirit will do his own thing so to speak through this dialogue his own thing in me and in my partner we enter into the dialogue recognizing that the Holy Spirit may require as radical a change in me as he required in Peter after the meeting with Cornelius I noted a phrase of the Catholic theologian Klaus
Klostermaier who has written a great deal about dialogue you may have seen his book Hindu and Christian in Vrindaban which is a delightfully written description of his experiences living in the sacred city of Vrindaban and living in continuous contact with Hindus and I noted this phrase of his speaking of his early experiences of dialogue with Hindus never did I feel more inadequate shattered and helpless before God all of a sudden the need for a metanoia in
depth a repentance in depth became inexpressively urgent but likewise we shall enter into dialogue with the expectation that the Holy Spirit may use the dialogue for the conversion of our partner of another faith we cannot exclude that possibility and I was interested to see not long ago an article by a Hindu philosopher who has had a good deal of participation in Hindu Christian dialogues a man whom I know who wrote an article recently on the whole
question of inter-religious dialogue and he in this he criticizes what has become the rather popular attitude that if you emphasize entirely the attitude of self criticism that each party should try to enter into the mind of the other that he should totally disavow the intention of conversion and so forth then all the really critical questions are excluded and he if it is impossible to lose one's faith as the result of an encounter with another faith
then I feel that the dialogue has been made safe from all possible risks and he concludes that that is no true dialogue the Christian therefore will go into dialogue believing that the sovereign power of the spirit can use the occasion for the radical conversion of his partner in dialogue and that is legitimate expectation and thirdly therefore when we speak of the Holy Spirit we are speaking of the one who glorifies Christ by taking the gifts of
God and showing them to the church the spirit I keep on repeating is not in the possession of the church the spirit is the Lord over the church guiding the church from its limited partial distorted understanding and embodiment of the truth into the fullness of the truth and the church needs the guidance of the spirit to distinguish between the truth and the falsehood in what it meets there is the need to try the as St. John
says not every spirit is of God there are spirits in the world plenty of them but not every spirit is of God not every form of vitality is God's work sometimes especially during the 1960s when this phrase God is at work in the world with such a popular phrase one sometimes had the that any up-and-coming thing is the work of the Holy Spirit anything that looks like the successful thing the wave of the future
is the work of the Holy Spirit now that way lies sheer paganism there is the need of discernment so that one distinguishes what is and what is not truly the work of the Spirit and the test of the Spirit's work as the New Testament constantly teaches us is that he leads to the confession of Jesus as Lord well understood in this Trinitarian context I think that dialogue is an essential part of the mission of the church
and but I would say that it is certainly not the whole of the church's mission that it does not exclude other kinds of activity I always felt for myself that while I was engaged in this kind of dialogue in the Ramakrishna mission in Kanchipuram it was important that all of those who participated also could see me from time to time standing on a box in the street and preaching that these things were everything is not dialogue
and everything is not preaching and there is and doing other things to teaching English grammar to little boys in a high school and so forth but I think dialogue is a proper part of the the total task of the church but not a not not not not the whole of it dialogue does not replace for example evangelism which if we define it as I have done in a distinct sense as being the actual communication of good
news is also a necessary element in in in mission evangelism is not the whole task of the church I repeat because the church has to do many other things besides speak words but evangelism is one of the essential tasks of the church but not everyone is an evangelist Paul makes that clear I think in his list of the gifts of the spirit there are times when it is appropriate to name the name of Jesus and there
are times when is not appropriate there are Christians who are called to a special gift of evangelism and others who are not the important thing is that we should all acknowledge one another's gifts and rejoice in one another's gifts and respect one another's gifts within that unity and variety of different dialogue with those of other faiths has a proper place not the sole place but a proper place I think the whole church should acknowledge and rejoice
in the gifts of different members which lead them to different kinds of activities provided they are all under the one purpose namely that we should bear witness to Christ and that brings me in in conclusion then to say something about the question of conversion in which we look after coffee at some of these statements from Frankfurt and Uppsala and Lausanne this is rather a delicate point some Hindus are suspicious of Christian interest in dialogue because they
see it as just another device for bringing about conversion as you probably know in India conversion is a very bad word there are certain parts of India where you can be put in prison for trying to convert people and conversion is a very bad word it is associated with all kinds of ideas of manipulation of improper interference in other people's lives and and so at this point at the end of this section I would like to
ask the question in the light of our whole discussion what do we mean by conversion and in what sense is conversion the purpose of our whole undertaking this I think is a very crucial point I think I have mentioned before that during the last period of our time in Madras I became involved in a very far-reaching program of rehabilitation for the slum people of Madras and among these activities we had a very ambitious program to
equip 48 of the sort of shantytown slum areas of Madras with modern sanitation with proper public latrines and and while we were engaged in this program one of the residents in one of these slums accosted one of our workers and said what are you doing this for are you trying to convert us and I find that when I tell that story in a meeting in England and then say what would you have answered the meeting breaks
up into a violent discussion in which people become extremely heated on both sides on the one hand there are those who would say it would be absolutely improper to suggest that you're interested in conversion then you are you are simply using kind of underhand methods to manipulate other people but on the other hand there will be those who will say the church is there for conversion and if you're not ultimately aiming at conversion you shouldn't be
there at all well I'm happy that my colleague on that occasion said his reply was yes of course we're trying to convert you you don't think we wanted to leave you as you are do you but then of course he had to go on to say what he meant by conversion if conversion is understood as it very often is simply as so to speak one more scalp for my collection or from the point of view of
the man that it is simply concerned with his own personal future salvation irrespective of what then I think we would have to say no we're not out for conversion but if we on the other hand mean by conversion that a person is being so changed that he becomes part of this action for the kingdom of God which involves the whole of his life the whole of this slum under which this public...