2003 / 4
Introduction
Janet Martin Soskice
The Declaration Dominus Iesus has once again drawn Catholic attention to the question of other faiths. The questions are not new. This volume steps off with some reflections on Dominus Iesus but continues in a mode that we believe is not only constructive and interesting, but incumbent upon on us now — that of listening to and learning from adherents of other faiths.
Peoples, and not just individuals, believe different things about the divine — this much has always been known. Herodotus knew it when he sailed the Nile, St Paul knew it when he preached on the Areopagus. At the Enlightenment Western Europeans did not ‘discover’ other faiths for the first time, but attempted a more positive rapprochement than had hitherto been the case.
The study of ‘religion’ in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries was as fraught with optimism and inconsistency as any other Enlightenment project. For instance, even the most Enlightened tended to assess the sacred teachings of distant lands (distant, that is, from Europe) by templates taken from Christian doctrine. The debate on other faiths became obsessed with the question of whether non-Christian religions offered ‘salvation’, but rarely enough was it asked whether all the things we call religions even speak about salvation, a thoroughly Christian notion which presumes, after all, that there is some thing or state to be saved from. Not all religions have this conceptual frame, and it is as much a Western imposition to presume this set of concerns as it is to deny any wisdom to a different faith tradition at all. But who is to say what a religion might be, and what are its defining characteristics? Does it have to have a teaching about salvation, or life after death? Surely not. Is it belief in a god or gods? Or ethical directives? A metaphysic of creation? It has proven less easy to identify ‘the religions’ than it has been to categorize new varieties of gazelle or mountain cat. The faith traditions cannot be compared point for point but evidence ‘family resemblances’ in Wittgenstein’s sense, with those at one remote fringe having little in common with distant cousins at the other. And where, in the analysis of a [8] faith tradition, should emphasis lie? If we emphasize the doctrinal we do a disservice, for instance, to Judaism, which revolves so significantly around practice. If we speak of ‘belief systems’ or ’world-views’ we suggest a clinical comprehensiveness which is inadequate in respect of the malleability and diversity of religion as ways in which people live and move and have their being. If we consider only the major monotheistic religions with high theologies we tend to overlook the syncretic cults which are so much a feature of religious practice as found. We are now at a broader stage of Christian engagement with other major faith traditions than was the case two hundred years ago — not least because our increasingly small world means that articulate adherents of those faiths are now putting questions to Christianity, and Christians are listening. It is a two-way street.
Our attitude to non-Christian religion cannot be, as Schleiermacher noted already in the early nineteenth century, that of the totally right to the totally wrong. Nor is it helpful or genuinely ’dialogical’ to throw away, on the grounds of spiritual generosity, all that is distinctively Christian. In today’s world of interfaith life as in ecumenical relations Hindus expect Catholics to speak as Catholics and vice versa. Gone is the would-be liberalism of the late twentieth century (in fact an intellectual strategy as imperialistic as any that went before) which, by reducing all religions to a shared pious mulch, purported to find their common identity. Jews do not expect Christians to drop the doctrine of the Trinity, but they may well want to try to see it, as does Peter Ochs in this volume, in the light of their own Jewish convictions.
We have a great deal to learn from others but this does not mean they should guide us on every point. Christians confess that Jesus is the Christ and that he is the ‘mediator and the universal redeemer’ (Dominus Iesus, 10). But Christians are not and never have been obliged to say that no truth comes through the other faiths, or from people of other faiths (see Dominus Iesus, 8). St Augustine makes a point of saying in his Confessions that a medical doctor who was not a Christian put him on the right track by telling him that claims to tell fortunes with entrails were nonsense. All truth is from God, says the saint.
It is perfectly consistent to say that Christ is the Way and the Truth, the one Mediator and to say that we do not know how exactly, in the fullness of time, this unique mediation will unfold for the good of the world. As Dominus Iesus puts it:
With respect to the way in which the salvific grace of God — which is [9] always given by means of Christ in the Spirit and has a mysterious relationship to the Church — comes to individual non-Christians, the Second Vatican Council limited itself to the statement that God bestows it ‘in ways known to himself’ (Dominus Iesus, 21).
Ignace Berten has read Dominus Iesus with disappointment and alarm, especially where he finds it suggesting that the Catholic Church is in sovereign possession of absolute truth, with nothing to learn from other religious traditions. The ideal of unity behind this, he fears, would be a world not only wholly Christian, but entirely Roman Catholic. He cites the words of a modern martyr to interfaith understanding, Mgr Pierre Claverie, some months before his assassination in Algeria — ‘I’ve come to the personal conviction that humanity is only plural and that as soon as we start claimingas has been the sad history of the Catholic Church in the course of our history — to possess the truth or to speak in the name of humanity we fall into totalitarianism. No one possesses the truth, each one searches for it.’ This more modest attitude to the ‘possession’ of truth is characteristic of the Christian contributions to this volume, but these are not without variation.
Here we come to a fundamentally important distinction to which Paul Griffiths draws attention in his more positive reading of Dominus Iesus. It is the difference, when speaking of the fullness of truth that the Church possesses, between ontological completeness and epistemological completeness. That Jesus is the Truth we may affirm: how this will work out in the history of nations, faiths and individuals we do not know. The Declaration seems to be making such a point in the passage cited above. Paul Griffiths wonders nonetheless if the Declaration does not, despite itself, sometimes elide the difference between ontological and epistemological, and suggest that the Catholic Church is in sole possession of the truth in propositional and comestible form. ‘All manner of things will be well,’ was God’s word to Dame Julian of Norwich, but God gave no detailed particulars. It is reasonable to believe that ‘God created the heavens and the earth’, but presumptuous to say we know just how God did it. This is not relativism but what the debates in philosophy of science call a ‘critical realism’, and it demands a certain modesty from those who make assertions of truth.
This sensitivity to the difference between the ‘order of being’ and the ‘order of knowing’ leaves a space where attentiveness to the faith of others may take its due place. The transformation in Jewish-Catholic relations over the past fifty years owes much to this admission that God, in working with his Chosen People, acts in ways ‘known to himself. Thomas Michel is right, [10] in this volume, to ponder on the Islamic ‘angels’ who tidied his house, unawares, and to see a moment of grace in this.
One of the premises of this volume is that Christians have spent too much time talking about whether other believers will be saved or not, or what their relationship to Christian faith might be, and too little time listening to what they might say in their own right about us. There is a better space for listening to others once genuine differences have been freely admitted and once we are open to the suggestion that religious diversity is not the work of Satan but, for whatever reason, the will of God. This volume hopes to facilitate this listening. A special place is given, in section II, to the sister ‘Abrahamic’ faiths of Judaism and Islam. Stefan Schreiner reminds us of the Christian debt to Jewish teachers who mediated, in turn, the wisdom of Islam and the lost works of Aristotle to the West in mediaeval Spain. Tarif Khalidi, commenting on a beautiful work by a Muslim poet, ‘Christ after the Crucifixion’, tells us of the Jesus of Muslim piety. Mustafa Abu Sway helps us flesh out the complexities of modern Islam, politics and the West. Peter Ochs undertakes a positive reappraisal of the doctrine of the Trinity from the perspective of an Orthodox Jew, and sees some affinity with the Kabbalists’ account of the varied identities of God.
The third section considers Eastern traditions, some of which have now migrated to the West (just as we must say that both Christianity and Islam are ’Far-Eastern’ religions). Sivanandam Panneerselvam’s essay, which takes the encyclical Fides et Ratio as its starting point, shows that the balance of faith and reason is not a Christian concern alone. Paul van der Welde writes about ‘Western Buddhism’ as it developed from the Eastern searchings of disaffected Westerners but now is an influence on practice in the Indian subcontinent itself. He reminds us that faith traditions are not static and that, while ‘Western Buddhism’ may look a variant of the ‘supermarket of religions’ approach to belief, inculturation has always been an essential aspect of Buddhism and is not to be despised.
Some of these themes are carried on in Leila Amaral’s essay on Brazilian carnival in section IV. For many years it was convenient for theologians to consider as ‘other religions’ only the major faith traditions, to the point of ignoring practices defined as ‘folklore’ or superstition. Nonetheless these last tell us a great deal about the people to whom they appeal. Brazil has long had its own syncretism of Catholicism and African, Muslim and Native American religion. Here at carnival Amaral sees ‘New Age’ bringing its own distinctive aspirations to the mix.
The student of religion must look to see how it is practised. ‘Practice’ [11] forms the major chords of Thomas Michel’s essay. Encounter with other faiths, he suggests, is best thought of as a matter of creative sharing of life. This ‘dialogue of life’ leads, to the attentive, to mutual blessing. And finally Erik Borgman reflects on the essays in this collection and brings together thoughts towards ‘a theological approach to religion’. In his case it is a kenotic theology, which sees in the self-emptying of the cross a model for our ethical obligation to listen to others. Of the cross Borgman remarks: ‘the very conviction of faith that here we can see what God is, in principle rules out the claim that Christianity is the absolute religion which embraces all truth’. There are elements in his article reminiscent of that of Paul Griffiths, but the conclusion is rather different. However we have not aimed at uniformity in this volume, rather at listening and an opening of the debate. If the collection serves those ends we will be pleased.
Concilium
English 
