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Christian Engagement in a Diverse Society

by Dr Vinoth Ramachandra

Whether you are in Singapore, Sri Lanka or Great Britain, we live in societies where many people who are equally intelligent, sincere and of goodwill, disagree with one another about their beliefs, the world, their values, they way they see things, and their social practices. This is a condition that we called pluralism or more generally, the challenge of ardentness. Pluralism or ardentness comes in a variety of forms. We have moral pluralism, cultural pluralism, ideological pluralism and religious pluralism. I want to concentrate on religious pluralism.
The question is how we should relate to people of other faiths and also their faith traditions? I want to suggest that our starting point must surely be to view people as what they are, that is, men and women who are made in the image of God and not primarily as followers of a particular religious path. So we are not thinking of people primarily as Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or even as Christians. Men and women have an intrinsic value, a worth, a dignity, simply because they are created in or as the image of God. So because they are created in the image of God, he or she commands our respect, and respecting people involves taking their beliefs, aspirations and fears with utmost seriousness, and even being prepared to be disturbed and challenged by them and ourselves.

Understanding importance of friendships
What I have to say is about the importance of relationships because what a person really believes and treasures in life can only be discovered through personal engagement. The willingness to explore the sacred text of the religious traditions of others is, of course, a necessary aspect of showing respect to them. But this can never be a substitute for the costly demands of friendships. There is an old Chinese proverb, which reminds us: “He who comes with the odor of enmity will invite the clash of weapons. He who comes with the fragrance of friendship will be loved like a brother”. This means that we must be prepared to listen with attention to other people, to listen as well as to speak. Indeed, to listen before we speak. That is the way of friendship and the cultivation of mutual trust and reciprocity. It is only in relationship of mutual trust that we can understand each other and speak truthfully in love.
According to Philip Sharper, “the idea of a dialogue presupposes … that we have two persons seriously attempting serious communications on serious matters. If one does all the talking, it is a monologue. If one attempts only to admonish and instruct, it is a sermon. If both talk only to score points or to expose the other’s weaknesses, it is a debate. If neither takes the subject seriously, it is badinage. If neither takes the person seriously, it is badinage. If neither takes the person seriously both the subject and the person, it is a dialogue”.

Engaging in inter-faith dialogue
There are pragmatic, political reasons for inter-faith dialogues. Conflict between religious communities is often provoked by insidious caricaturising and stereotyping of other people’s beliefs and practices and goals. In this context, a Hindu scholar called Anantanand Ramabachan from Trinidad, who is teaching in Christian college in the United States, makes an interesting observation:
“Communities where differences are real, but where they are minimised or downplayed, are more likely to suffer violence and traumatic upheavals when, in times of tension and conflict, such differences become prominent. Communities, on the other hand, which engage each other in a deep search for mutual understanding and which honestly acknowledge differences and cultivate respect, are less likely to explode in times of conflict. Such communities are less likely to cite differences as a basis for hostility towards the other. I often wonder about this matter when we witness neighbours, in many recent conflicts, suddenly turning upon each other with ferocity and violence, shattering the veneer of civility and harmony”.

Christians in the course of their daily lives interact and collaborate with non-Christians on projects of various kinds, from serving in a housing association committee or condominium committee, to working together with others on a government policy think- tank. And that is the normal context in which opportunities for serious dialogue emerged. The idea of dialogue conjures up images of religious dignitaries seated around the table in a set piece consultation on some theological topics. Certainly, there is a place for such dialogue, especially when these dignitaries represent their respective religious communities. But it would be unfortunate if these were to be taken as the normal mode of dialogue.
I have little faith in such set piece formal events but I am much more enthusiastic about informal gatherings of Christians with non-Christians to discuss issues that affect their common lives together in society, whether it is dealing with local problems like the garbage disposal in the neighborhood or human rights abuses in your society. It is often in the course of such discussion that questions can be raised that will take the discussion on to a more searchingly personal level where people’s worldviews are disclosed and the basic assumptions on which they live their lives are now opened to scrutiny and to loving critique. So dialogue is not primarily an event or activity, rather it is an attitude. Indeed it is a way of live. It is an attitude of hospitality, a disposition which reaches out and makes room for others who are different or even antagonistic towards us. So understand and practise an intentionally lifestyle, as it goes far beyond mere co-existence or an uncritical friendliness.

Michael Barnes writes: “Like any human activity, conversation will include argument and misunderstanding but if concluded with respect for the dignity and freedom of the individual, it will allow people to change themselves under the guidance of God’s Spirit rather than simply being manipulated by the louder voice or the more sophisticated argument.”
For the Christians, dialogue with another is an aspect of witness to the truth of Christ. Witnessing is the primarily calling for a Christian church with a genuine longing for the other to come to, what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ”. Wherever there is that yearning, there will always be a posture of listening for it is the desire to communicate that motivates us to listen well to others. Kenneth Cragg writes, after many decades of experience in the Middle East with Muslim intellectuals: “It is our life task to make bridges into their minds. This means being near enough to be heard”.

Templar Garner was an Anglican missionary who worked in Cairo for 30 years, spanning the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. He was a gifted linguist, who understood Islam well enough to be able to debate publicly in Arabic with scholars from the famous Al-Azhra University in Cairo and when Garner died, his colleague, Yusuf Effendi commented “other teachers taught us how to refute Islam but he taught us how to love Muslims”. But criticizing people’s beliefs is also to take them seriously, and to refuse to criticize the other or to treat the other as just another version of myself but in a different dress, is actually to insult the other and ironically a rejection of authentic pluralism. But then, we have also isolated ourselves from the possibility of our being converted to either their beliefs or to a deepened commitment to our own. So to elevate the similarities and to belittle the fundamental differences between our beliefs and others is not to take them seriously at all and it is also to betray our own heritage.

A friend of mine, Chawkat Moucarry who is a Syrian Christian who is currently working for World Vision International, writes out of his life-long involvement with Muslims all over the world that dialogue is “an expression of loving our neighbours, we must show respect to Muslims and to the heart of their identity - their prophet, their religion, and their scriptures …. This does not mean abstaining from criticism of Islam but when we have critical comments to make, we need to put them in the least offensive language and to ensure as far as we can that they are substantiated”. Jesus enjoins His disciples not to be naïve and to look critically at self-proclaimed prophets (Matthew 7:15-20); and in the same breath, He commands them to take a long critical look at themselves (Matthew 7:1-5, 21-23).
We engaged in dialogue also to discover ourselves, for we do not know what we really believed, let alone how far our lives conformed to what we claimed to believe until we engaged with others especially with those who are profoundly different from us. Michael Barnes writes: “to be Christian, Hindu, Jew or Sikh, Muslim or Buddhist, is to learn to speak the language of an ancient tradition - a process of growth rather than a state of being. Dialogue is based on the principle that the other has a crucial role to play in the learning of that language for it is only when I have someone prepared to listen to me that I learn how to speak. And only when I learn how to speak, do I know what it is that I have to say. The conversation helps both partners to articulate their experience, to become not “other” but truly self”.
So listening will lead at times to a new appreciation and other times, to profound disagreement and vigorous debate. Sometimes, the differences that we discover through dialogue may be less important that we thought and other times, the similarities that we assumed to exist turned out on closer inspection to be rather superficial.

Being responsible and responsive Christian witness
All witness and thus all dialogue are a risky undertaking because it leaves both parties to change, and that is why many Christians, especially evangelical Christians, hesitate to be friends and to engage with those who are different. We much prefer the monologue of preaching at people from a distance. We are too busy with our church programmes and so-called evangelistic meetings, than with the business of building relationships across barriers of misunderstanding and mutual ignorant. But this is a betrayal of our calling in Christ because it is to say that we have nothing more to learn about Christ. But we have everything. I suggest that Christians do not face the world with the claim that we possess the truth, come and learn from us but rather with the claim that He, Jesus Christ, is the truth. And the knowledge that we have is partial, fragmentary, and open to the charge of being mere opinions. The truths about God, Jesus and us still await its public and outward demonstration. On the day of the consummation of God’s kingdom, the day of resurrection, and until that day when all hostile powers are subjected to Christ, the apostle Paul tells us we see in a mirror dimly (1 Corinthians 13:12).
Martin Luther puts it famously “I am simultaneously saint and sinner”. We are simultaneously saints and sinners. We are not yet redeemed. So yes, I have been grasped by the truth as it is in Christ and yet, I am ever growing into the fullness of that truth and in this pilgrimage of growing into Christ even as I shared the story of Jesus with others, I find myself drawn deeper into that story and given fresh insights into it. So it is humility that enables us to see the ways in which we may be prone to use our Christianity to actually conceal uncomfortable truths about God and ourselves or to bolster our security in self-justification.

I propose that authentic evangelism must change the evangelist as much as it changes the recipients of the gospel. The Bible is full of stories of how the faith of the covenant people of God is challenged by those who stand currently outside the covenant. Take the book of Jonah, for instance. The book of Jonah is best read as a parable of warning to the people of Israel. The pagans in the story who do not know Yahweh are actually more responsive to Yahweh. They are more attractive as human beings than the prophet of Yahweh, Jonah. The pagan sailors, for example, are more God-fearing. The people of Nineveh instantly repented whereas it is Jonah the prophet who runs away in disobedience and who does not share the compassion and the mercy of the God whom he professes to worship.
We should read the book of Jonah side by side with Luke’s account of the apostle Peter’s reluctant encounter with the Roman centurion, Cornelius. Remember how Peter is dragged through a series of visions. His hypnotic state is broken down step by step and he ends up in the home of a Roman centurion, something unthinkable is taking place - a Jewish fisherman in the home of a Gentile sinner. And when Peter enters the home of Cornelius, he does not begin by talking or preaching. He begins by listening to Cornelius, who tells his story of his own genuine experience of God and Luke is in no doubt that Cornelius actually knows God. There is a relationship with God so we must be careful when we sometimes very loosely think that every non-Christian has no relationship or no genuine experience of God.

It is only then that Peter confesses his prejudice and his own narrow grasp of the gospel and narrates the story of Jesus that Cornelius recognises in the story the marvelous fulfillment of his own spiritual journey. There is a kind of double conversion taking place in the story. Cornelius turns to Jesus, he receives the forgiveness of sins, the gift of the Holy Spirit but Peter is also turned under the leading of the Holy Spirit to a deeper obedience to Jesus and a bigger understanding of what the gospel means. So a Christian conversion may have a discernible beginning but it has no end. We are being converted to Christ right through our life. So assured of our new identity in Christ, we are now not afraid to ask questions and to explore life in all its contradictions and paradoxes. We are not afraid to be corrected and learned even from non-Christian people.

The church engages in mission to the world not only for the sake of the world but also for the sake of the church so that we can grow to a deeper commitment to Christ and to grasp more of the significance of the Christ to whom we bear testimony. After more than 2,000 years of flawed yet faithful Christian witnesses, the faith has been translated and transmitted across a multitude of linguistics and cultural frontiers. Every time a new frontier is crossed, the Holy Spirit unpacks more of the meaning and the significance of Christ for the church. As Professor Andrew Walls say, using a rather bold metaphor: “It is as if Christ Himself grows in mission”. That is why we need the global body of Christ to actually discover who Christ is for us today. We need a global hermeneutics and no ethnic or national church can be self-sufficient. So who amongst us can deny that God has used non-Christian people and even militantly anti-Christ voices to bring the church in recent decades to a deeper obedience to Christ?
I can think of secular feminists, environmental activists, animal rights campaigners, post -colonial writers, who helped me to discover my own blind spots. It is encounters with genuinely other that liberate us from one-sided perspectives. The best of post -modernistic thinking with its radical protests against oppressive system of thoughts, has helped me to pay closer attention to the language that I use, particularly or including theological language that shaped my self-understanding. Listening to gay Christians tell of their experiences with the church forces us to repent of homophobia and the idolisation of marriage and family life in our churches, without necessarily accepting the whole gay political agenda.

Showing bold humility in mission
Mission has bold humility. To confess that the risen Christ is universally active through His Holy Spirit, the church is claiming that no part of God’s world is closed to the sustaining and transforming influence of the risen Christ. The church that is not attentive to both the religious and secular environments in which she is called to witness is guilty of being inattentive to the risen Christ and the prompting of His Holy Spirit. We close ourselves to the leading of the Spirit into a deeper truth, beauty and holiness and such lack of attention and unwillingness to be surprised by God is actually idolatry.
There are questions that we asked in our churches such as - what is the final destiny of people who through no fault of their own have no chance to hear the good news of Jesus Christ? Such question can be safely left in the hands of a God whom the gospel reveals to be perfectly just and perfectly gracious in His dealings with humanity. We are called not to be judges but to be witnesses. That is a very different legal matter. It is God, who is the ultimate Judge and we are not to pre-empt His judgments. We are simply called to be a witness, which is a more humble role. So to claim that all who do not make an explicit profession of faith in Jesus as Lord are eternally lost, I think that claim is to go beyond the biblical evidence. It is to deny salvation, say, to the Old Testament people of God who did not make any explicit confession concerning Jesus or the cross. It is to deny salvation to those who are severely mentally handicapped and are incapable of such response. It is to deny salvation to little children, who died prematurely and so on. But on the other hand to argue that all men and women are saved, irrespective of Christ, is to contradict the entire biblical testimony.

All we can say humbly yet boldly is that if anyone is saved, it will not be through any religions or through any human attainment but solely through the objective atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, whether consciously appropriated or not. So God may graciously give saving faith to men and women while they live in the context of a non-Christian religion. God may even be at work in the transformation of those religious traditions to reflect more His purposes for the world such as justices and peace-making but that is not the same as claiming that those religious traditions are vehicles of divine salvation and have been raised up with that intent. If men and women find God, it may be despite their religious practices and not through them.

We should welcome and rejoice in every sign of God’s grace at work in the lives of all people of whatever backgrounds. There are struggles for justice, peace and human dignity in which we can and must co-operate with those of other worldviews in order to achieve specific goals, which conform to our vision of the kingdom of God. Obviously, we shall differ in our respective visions of the ultimate meaning and goals of history as well as in our motivation for such struggles. There will be points in our common journey with others where we will discover that the parting of ways may be necessary. But such points of divergence and conflicts are real opportunities for genuine dialogue and for faithful witness.

Conclusion
Let me end with a quotation from a well-known British theologian and biblical scholar, Richard Bauckham. He writes: “The biblical story is not only critical of other stories but also hospitable to other stories. On its way to the kingdom of God, it does not abolish all other stories, but brings them all into relationship to itself and its way to the kingdom. It becomes the story of all stories, taking with it into the kingdom all that can be positively related to the God of Israel and Jesus. The presence of so many little stories within the biblical meta-narrative, so many fragments and glimpses of other stories, within Scripture itself, is surely a sign and an earnest of that. The universal that is the kingdom of God is no dreary uniformity or oppressive denial of difference, but the milieu in which every particular reaches its true destiny in relation to the God who is the God of all because He is the God of Jesus.”

(This talk was given at the Graduates’ Christian Fellowship Intersect Conference 2010 “Real World, Real Christian” on 19 March 2010 at the Singapore Bible College)