TOWARD THEOLOGY IN
DIALOGUE (EXCERPTED FROM Kansas City Star article by Bill
Tammeus)
…The
harder
issue is whether
there's any eternal difference between and among religions followed
by people of good will, by people with a social conscience, by people
who understand how to live in harmony with others.
Joseph C. Hough Jr., president of Union Theological Seminary in New
York, has been raising this prickly question in recent months. In
speeches and in widely disseminated interviews with The New York
Times and National Public Radio, Hough has suggested that Christians
adopt a different way of viewing other faiths. He says that simply
tolerating other faiths is "not sufficient in a world of
religious
pluralism."
Hough says it's important to study and understand other religions and
that "we want to be careful about claiming that one religious
form is
the only one that is authentic or real."
Hough, a minister in the United Church of Christ, is quick to deny,
however, that he's rejecting the essential tenets of his own faith.
(Though no doubt some will think so.) Nor, he says, is he suggesting
that all religions are interchangeable.
"Not all religions are equal for me," he said in The Times
interview. "For my faith, Jesus Christ is decisive. But I am a
Christian who strongly believes that God has always been and now is
working everywhere in every human culture to redeem the world. ...
Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and others have been and are being
transformed by a powerful vision of God that redeems them with hope
and infuses their religious practice with compassion, justice and
peace."
The challenge in a world full of religions is to be true to one's own
while trying to understand how others have chosen a different
one.
Last October, less than a month after the terrorist attacks, I was
privileged to hear one of the most important modern Christian
theologians, Jurgen Moltmann, a German professor and author. He spoke
at a small dinner gathering at Nazarene Theological Seminary in
Kansas City.
I think Moltmann offered an authentic way to be true to one's own
faith while respecting and trying to understand other ways.
"The more we live in a pluralistic society," he said,
"the
more we
must be clear about our own Christian identity. We don't need a
theology of dialogue. We need theology in dialogue."
To understand Moltmann's remark, it helps if you substitute the name
of any other faith for the word "Christian." Moltmann wants
people of
faith to be able to articulate what they believe and why they believe
it. Then -- without losing their theology in a syncretistic and
ultimately meaningless religious soup -- he wants people to discuss
their faith with others of different religions to understand those
traditions better.
Hough has suggested something similar: "It's the difference
between
an attempt to convert and an attempt to bear witness. The attempt to
bear witness is the attempt to state honestly what you have
discovered in faith in Jesus Christ. ... But this is very different
from saying, `Now that I've told you this, you've got to believe as I
do to experience this.' The one is an opening to conversation; the
other is closing conversation."
The truth is that when people kill themselves and others and then
claim religious reasons for doing so, we simply must talk about
religion honestly. But the discussion will be meaningless unless we
know what we ourselves believe.
Bill Tammeus is a member of the Editorial Board of KCS. To reach him,
call (816) 234-4437 or send e-mail to tammeus@kcstar.com.
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