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4. A Biblical Basis for Dialogue?

In the monthly Letter on Evangelism (August 1982), one of the readers from India recalled the following incident:

 

Once a Gandhian leader came to Kohima and we had fellowship with him. As I was sitting by him, he started conversing with me about religious matters: "There are some extreme Christians who say that man can be saved through Christ only and there is no other way. What is your view?" "It is what I believe," I replied. "There are millions and millions of people in other major religions of the world. What will be their fate?" he hastily asked. "According to the Bible those who do not believe in Christ will perish," I replied. He angrily departed.

 

My conviction is that whether we like it or not we cannot compromise the truth.

 

This is a revealing story. First, it shows how, in a country like India, no one really needs to organize dialogues between persons of different faiths. Sitting beside the others on a social occasion provides the opportunity for what can be a fascinating Hindu-Christian dialogue.

 

Secondly, note that the Hindu partner left the scene deeply hurt, not because he lost the argument, but because there was no conversation at all! For a Hindu the Christian attitude would have appeared as an extreme form of intolerance.

 

Of course, many Christians are convinced that Christ is the "only way", but they will not close the conversa­tion. They will have dialogue with the Gandhian leader, and perhaps even make it an occasion for Christian witness.

 

Yet the story is not untypical. It illustrates the attitude of millions of Christians in Asia and elsewhere towards people of other faiths. The Christian partner in the story displays a certain intolerance, which seems almost against his own nature:

 

"Whether we like it or not," he says, "we cannot compromise the truth". And what is this truth? "According to the Bible, those who do not believe in Christ will perish"! He does not want them to, but as a Christian, he must accept the Bible's verdict.

 

There is a fundamental issue at stake here. Is the Bible against a dialogical relationship with neighbors of other faiths? Or is the biblical message, however carefully, courteously and hum­bly it is presented, uncompromising in its demand that every one must believe in and accept Jesus Christ in order to be saved.

 

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There is little hope, in such an understanding, for people of other faiths.

 

In order to show that the attitude reflected in the story is not part of "popular" belief, but is based on certain clear theological convictions and a certain interpretation of the Bible, let me quote from a recent book:

 

We cannot be neutral observers of other religions. In the first place the Gospel of Jesus Christ comes to us with a built-in prejudgment of all other faiths so that we know in advance of our study what we must ultimately conclude about them. They give meaning to life apart from that which God has given in the biblical story culminating in Jesus Christ, and they organize life outside the covenant community of Jesus Christ. Therefore, devoid of this saving knowledge and power of God, these faiths not only are unable to bring men to God, they actually lead men away from God and hold them captive from God. This definitive and blanket judgment... is not derived from our investigation of the religions, but is given in the structure and content of Gospel faith itself.1

 

Let us for the moment not deal with this attitude of making "definitive and blanket judgments" without even studying other faiths. For, the most serious statement here is that such an evaluation is to be found in the "structure and content of the Gospel faith itself.

 

Is this really so? Is the biblical message so negative about those who do not accept and believe in Jesus, the Christ? Or is there another way to understand and read the Gospels that could become a different basis for our relationship with those who do not believe the way we do?

 

God's dialogue with the world

Few people will dispute that the heart of the Bible is the affirmation of God's loving relationship with human beings. There is in the Bible the affirmation that God is love. As a statement about the nature of ultimate reality, or as a description of what God is like, such a statement may evoke little con­troversy. The Bible, however, does not stop with the affirma­tion that God is love. In fact, the Gospels tell the story of what it means to be loving. That is the Good News. The gospel reveals

 

1 Edmund Perry, The Gospel in Dispute, Garden City, N.Y. Doubleday & Co, 1958, p.83.

 

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the nature of God’s love; it reveals what it actually meant for God in terms of God’s relationship with the world.

 

The affirmation that God was in Christ, therefore, has a very special meaning. It is a claim that in the life and ministry of Jesus we come to know about God and God's relationship with human beings. We are not dealing with the Christological question of how or in what sense God was in Christ. All that we can say from the witness of those who lived with Christ and experienced Christ is that they were convinced that, meeting him, they came into a living encounter with God. It is in this sense that Bishop J.A.T. Robinson speaks about Jesus becom­ing a "window" into God. Those who believe that in Jesus they had a "glimpse" into the nature of God should ask themselves as to what indeed they were able to "see" of God in Jesus' life. When the question is put in this way, dialogue is seen to be at the heart of the gospel.

 

For the gospel is not a message of rejection; it is a message of acceptance. Jesus preached a message of acceptance and claimed that God already accepts people even before they turn to him. Repentance, in Jesus' teaching, is not a condition for acceptance; it is a response to the acceptance that God has already extended to all persons. The problem that Jesus had with some of his contemporaries was that he extended this accep­tance, in practice, to all kinds of people who in popular view were not "acceptable".

 

Jesus also rooted this message in his understanding of the nature of God. In love God relates to people; there is no other way God can relate to people, for love is of the essence of God. God "makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil" (Matt. 5:45).

 

To say, therefore, that God will not love you unless you repent, or that God will not save you unless you believe in what God has done in Jesus Christ, is to reverse the order of the gospel message. It seriously distorts the gospel and presents a message that is alien to the biblical understanding of God.

 

God's love is unconditional. It is because God loves us that the gospel calls us to repent - to turn around from a life centered on the self - and begin a life centered on God's love and acceptance.

 

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Jesus' attitude to children illustrates this aspect of the gospel message. The disciples were trying to prevent the parents from bringing the children to Jesus (Mark 10:13-16). We do not know why exactly they stood between Jesus and the children. It could be that the child, the disciples felt, would not be able to understand or respond to the teachings of Jesus. Why waste the Master's time on children when he should be teaching the adults and calling them to the discipleship of the kingdom! Or it could simply be that they considered children to be a nuisance, as many people do.

 

But Jesus insists on receiving them. He goes further. He says that the kingdom of God belongs to them. On another occasion, he goes to the extent of declaring that unless one becomes like a child one cannot enter the kingdom of God.

 

Here the biblical message is unambiguously dialogical. For it insists on the "previousness" of grace, and of God's acceptance of us before our acceptance of God. The people we meet, of whatever religion, race or age, are all in that sense people of God. It is this belief that the other person is as much a child of God as I am that should form the basis of our relationship with our neighbors. That attitude is at the heart of being in dialogue.

 

Dialogue is also at the very heart of the cross. Jesus' death is understood and interpreted in many ways. But, among other things, the cross surely stands for the vulnerability of love. Jesus, in his passion and death, acts out the consequences of his teaching on love. To the end, he refused to hate and to reject. With those who dealt unjustly with him, he was invariably patient. True to his own message, he never failed people. He would rather be rejected than reject. What marked his life and his message was total availability. In that sense, the incarnation is God's dialogue with the world. It is an expression of how God always stands with the human community.

 

That is to say, interfaith dialogue is based on acceptance, which is at the heart of the gospel message, an acceptance that is not demanding, but self-giving. It is the ability to accept the other in his or her otherness. If we cannot accept others as God's children until they believe as we do, then we do not act or speak from within the message of the gospel. If we say that those who do not believe in Christ and do not belong to the Christian community are outside the saving providence and power of

 

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God, we are talking about a God who is not the God of Jesus Christ. For the distinctive message that Jesus gave, which in fact made his news good news, is that God loves us first and that his love is unchanging and unfailingly available.

 

The belief that people of other faiths are outside the saving activity of God is not only a comment about the people, but also about God. The God of the Bible, the God whom Jesus called Father, rules over all and is in all. All things have their being in God.

 

In other words, I want to claim that the central message of the Bible is deeply dialogical. It is unfortunate that much of our attitude towards other faiths developed mainly out of our read­ing of the exclusive verses of the Bible, not out of its central message. We are in dialogue precisely because our God is the God whom Jesus revealed to us, and we believe in the profound love of God that embraces all humanity. God is our freedom, setting us free and making us open so that we can meet and talk with our neighbors of other faiths, treating them as our brothers and sisters. We do not reject our neighbors or con­demn them simply because acceptance and understanding are the corner stone of the gospel message.

 

Jesus' attitude to false religion

"All this is true, but it is only part of the truth," it could be objected, "for there is in the life and teachings of Jesus a clear rejection of certain aspects of religion and a call to repentance and commitment to a new way of life." Isn't there indeed an implied rejection of all religions in the gospel?

 

Implicit in such a view is a sharp distinction between people and their religion. It would claim that while God loves people, the gospel rejects all religions. It is people whom God redeems and not religious systems, which are "pagan" and work against God. This attitude is described - and criticized by the editors themselves - in a dramatic way in a recent book:

 

... approach to other religions, has been to view them as systems which are pagan, heathen, and closed to the activity of God in history. They are anti-Christian systems, which have no signs of redemption in them. Only the people in them are redeemable. The system itself is not redeemable. Therefore, the approach is to confront the systems by hurling gospel grenades

 

 

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over the boundary walls in a process designed to raze the religious system to the ground. While this siege is in progress, the attacking forces rescue what inmates they can, clean them up, baptize them, and then use them as frontline troops in the siege operations.2

 

Implicit in the view described above is a serious misunder­standing that other religions, like a large part of Protestant Christianity, have to do with cerebral beliefs and systems of thought, which can be separated, from the persons who hold those beliefs. What is even stranger is the simple assumption that all religions are against God. Further, here is an attempt to separate religion from history, which can be called in question. Often life, religion and history are inseparable. In those situations, what does it mean to proclaim God as the Lord of life or of history?

 

But let us return to the Bible and ask the question whether Jesus was against the religion of his time. Did he draw a sharp distinction between the gospel and the prevalent religion, and reject the religion of the people in favor of the gospel?

 

There is no doubt that Jesus rejected hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and the kind of religion that was outward and ceremonial and devoid of spiritual meaning. But there is little or no evidence that he rejected the religion of the people, or condemned it. He himself regularly worshipped in the synagogue; he was familiar with the Torah, visited the Tem­ple and kept the feasts. He claimed that he came to fulfill the Law and not to abolish it. Nowhere is the suggestion that people should reject Judaism and relinquish religion al­together.

 

For Jesus, false religion is that which substitutes external ceremony for internal spirituality. The whole of the Sermon on the Mount is a call to "internalize" the law so that it becomes a spiritual springboard for authentic action based on love.

 

Of course, Jesus announced the in breaking of the kingdom of God; he did call people to a radical repentance, away from the self and turned towards God; he did teach that religion is more a matter of relationships than of belief systems and ceremonies.

 


2 Sharing Jesus in the Two Thirds World, ed. Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1983, p. 132.

 

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But none of these took the form of anti–religious “grenade throwing exercise”.

 

The Christian rejection of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam is therefore not to be equated with Jesus' challenge to the religious tradition of his time. Jesus was part of that religion. He, like many of the prophets before him, was challenging his own tradition to become true to its calling. That was why his own people saw him as a teacher and prophet.

 

Of course we do not know what Jesus would have said if he were to comment on "other" religious traditions! The few instances where the Gospels record Jesus' encounter with out­siders to Judaism do not really help us to come to any conclu­sions. But there were cases when Jesus was surprised to find that the so-called "outsiders", like the Canaanite woman, were more responsive to his teaching than some among his own people (Matt. 15:21-28).

 

Jesus was in dialogue with his own religious tradition. He affirmed it, but he also challenged it where it seemed to stray from its true purpose and intentions. He had new perceptions of what God intends for human lives, he gave expression to them within an overall attitude of participation and involvement in his own religious tradition.

 

That is why it is difficult to accept the position that other religious traditions are outside "the saving knowledge and power of God". It is even more difficult to accept it when the judgment is made without listening to, learning from, under­standing and participating in those religious traditions and when the rejection is claimed to result from the "structure and content of the gospel message itself".

 

How can we make such assertions if we do believe that love, self-giving and vulnerability are at the heart of the gospel message? One must admit that Christians of some of the domi­nant cultures have heavily overplayed the "judging" aspect of the gospel message. Instead of seeing the gospel as judging and challenging their own lives and religious values, they have used it to condemn, and even to reject other religious traditions and their adherents. It is now important to recover the attitude of dialogue as an essential component of our relationship with other people and their faiths. Because that attitude is consistent with the teach­ing and the witness of the Jesus whom we meet in the scriptures.

 

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Discerning the kingdom

Dialogue also has to do with discernment, and the call to discernment is central to the message of Jesus. His life and his teaching pointed to the reign of God. As we said elsewhere, this reign or kingdom of God is under no one's control. It is invisible and mysterious; no one knows its limits or its extent. It is not easy to discern where it is and where it is not.

 

But the truly radical nature of the kingdom lies in the fact that it has little to do with religious boundaries. The reign of God breaks into human life, and not into the life of one community or another. If we truly believe that God's kingdom is at work in the whole of human history then we will need to discern it in all kinds of lives and in all sorts of places. The parable of the sheep and the goats is a constant reminder of such participation in the reign of God by those who have little or no consciousness of it (Matt. 25:31-46).

 

The belief in the kingdom urges us to dialogue. For surely it cannot be that, there is only one witness to a kingly rule that embraces all life and all of life; surely, there are no situations and persons that God cannot use to further the cause of the kingdom. And how can we discern if we are not even prepared to listen to and learn from what God is doing in other lives. Dialogue can become the engagement in which Christians discern and cele­brate the truly universal sweep of the rule of God over all life.

 

Scriptural witness to the universality of Christ

The truly universal nature of God's rule is a theme on which the Bible dwells at many points. We have already seen how the Old Testament prophets constantly struggled to understand God's relationship with Israel within the context of God's relationship with and rule over all nations. The theme is persis­tent in the Psalms. The eschatological hope, whether it is in Isaiah or in the Book of Revelation, has to do with the whole of the universe, and not with parts or segments of it.

 

The New Testament writers understood the significance of Jesus in its truly universal dimension. Paul is in constant dialogue with his own Jewish tradition, not to deny the reality of the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but to link it to Christ and what Christ means. John seeks to do this by speaking of Jesus as the incarnation of the pre-existent Word, who was in

 

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the beginning, and through whom all things were made. The Word is described as the light that lightens everyone that comes into the world.

 

There is no doubt that the scriptures see the Christ-event as having a universal significance. But what does it mean for the way we look at the world, and especially for our dealings with people who live by other faith convictions? Some tend to divide the world into two camps - those who believe in Jesus Christ and thereby receive salvation; and those who have either refused to believe or have not had the opportunity to believe and thus do not participate in this salvation. In this view, the only way to be right with God is to repent and believe in Jesus Christ. There is a good example of this position in the Lausanne Covenant. Speaking of the uniqueness and universality of Christ, it says:

 

We affirm that there is only one Savior and only one Gospel, although there is a wide diversity of evangelistic approaches. We recognize that all men have some knowledge of God through his general revelation in nature. But we deny that this can save, for men suppress the truth by their unrighteousness. We also reject as derogatory to Christ and the gospel every kind of syncretism and dialogue which implies that Christ speaks equally through all reli­gions and ideologies. Jesus Christ, being himself the only Godman, who gave himself as the only ransom for sinners, is the only mediator between God and man. There is no other name by which we must be saved. All men are perishing because of sin, but God loves all men, not wishing that any should perish but that all should repent. Yet those who reject Christ repudiate the joy of salvation and condemn themselves to eternal separation from God. To proclaim Jesus as "the Savior of the World" is not to affirm that all men are either automatically or ultimately saved, still less to affirm that all religions offer salvation in Christ. Rather it is to proclaim God's love for a world of sinners and to invite all men to respond to him as Savior and Lord in the whole-hearted personal commitment of repentance and faith. Jesus Christ has been exalted above every other name; we long for the day when every knee shall bow to him and every tongue shall confess him Lord.

 

Here the biblical understanding of the universality of Christ is given one particular interpretation. Yes, Christ is universal insofar as the salvation offered in him is available to all persons. But all persons should hear the message, repent, and believe in him in order to be saved.

 

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The word "only" is used again and again. Only one Savior, only one Gospel, only Godman, only ransom, only mediator. The emphasis is on the assertion that there is no other name by which one should be saved. Here indeed is an exclusivistic way of interpreting the biblical understanding of universality.

 

The late D.T. Niles was of the opinion that this way of interpreting the universality of Christ goes against the doctrine of grace: "The issue of salvation or otherwise of humankind cannot be stated in terms of human beings' belief or disbelief in the salvation offered in Christ. It has to do with what Christ does with the human family." Without entering into this particular debate, I wish only to show that there are other implications of the universality of Christ.

 

It is indeed possible to understand the significance of the biblical witness to the universality of Jesus Christ in a way that places Christ, and not the human being, at the centre. Viewed thus, dialogue becomes the most natural way to relate to the rest of humanity precisely because Christ is universal! This is how Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios, for example, understands the biblical teaching on the universality of Christ:

 

Christ is the first-born of creation, the head of all created reality. He loves not only all men and women, but also all that is created. I am united to Christ in baptism and confirmation. My mind is the mind of Christ. Therefore, my love is non-exclusive and open to the whole creation. Nothing is alien or threatening. Love and compas­sion for the whole creation is the characteristic of Christ. The church as his body shares in this love and compassion. I as a member of that body have to express that love and compassion in faithfulness, integrity and openness, with sympathetic understanding. This is sufficient and compelling reason for me to engage in dialogue with people of other faiths. It is love in Christ that sends me to dialogue.

 

These two statements come from two very different church traditions. They both affirm the universality of Christ, but one of them is uncompromising and exclusive, and leaves no room for genuine dialogue. In the other, the very affirmation of the universality of Christ becomes the basis for a dialogue relation­ship with people of all religious persuasions.