Being Ecumenical And Interfaith While Remaining Committed To Trinitarian Theology
A Guidebook To Progressive Church #22
Before the pandemic a favorite program our congregation coordinated was a partnership with the area synagogue, Islamic Center, the Episcopalians, plus the Buddhist community and some Hindu friends to host a summer, week-long Interfaith Camp.
Over the course of a week campers visited multiple sites in our city to learn about the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths in interfaith perspective.
Because this was a camp for children, we kept to the basics. For many of them, a tour of the synagogue or Islamic Center was their first time visiting such spaces. Perhaps less for Jewish and Muslim participants in the camp who had already visited churches because, well, there’s a Christian Church on every block in our town. And that’s not an exaggeration.
Lots of wonderful, rich and complex work has been done exploring the connection between various faiths. But on a very practical level, people of different faiths lack the most basic experience of simply being in each other’s spaces. I’m guessing even many readers of this blog may never have visited a synagogue or mosque or attended religious services outside of their own Christian tradition.
For this reason alone, the camp was a real blessing. Not only did campers from many different religious traditions spend a week together making friends: they can also now all say, “Yes, I’ve been to an Islamic Center. Yes, I’ve been to a synagogue.” And if they were paying attention, they might also know that we have many overlapping traditions (like Abraham is important in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and we also do some things differently.
Around the same time our congregation was partnering with area faith communities for Interfaith Camp, we’d also worked to deepen various interfaith practices. For example, during Ramadan the Islamic Center puts on a meal every day at sundown. As a Lutheran congregation we had the chance to prepare one of these meals for them and also eat with the community. Similarly, over the years we have coordinated regularly with the synagogue on interfaith prayer vigils, educational events, and visits to one another’s worship services.
All these kinds of practices require a certain level of trust and maintenance of caring relationship. In a part of the country where many Christians are attempting to “convert” the Jewish or Muslim communities, it is part of our responsibility as progressive Christians to model a different way, a way of interfaith sharing and, in some instances, multi-faith belonging.
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When we practice interfaith community, I think some may perceive it in overly simplistic fashion. Kind of like, “Well, all religions lead to the same place/goal. It’s all good.” This not what I actually believe or practice.
My sense of interfaith community is about growing in our own faith by being in relationship with other faiths. That is to say, I don’t actually think that a Jew, or a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Buddhist, or a Hindu, all has the same sense of the ultimate, where everything is heading. Each of our eschatologies may differ, and to melt them all together into one homogenous whole is presumptive and problematic.
Instead, what I believe is going on in interfaith dialogue is unity in diversity. A shared kind of curiosity, where a Muslim will not attempt to disabuse a Christian of their Trinitarian sensibilities but rather open a conversation about how the Islamic belief that “there is no God but God” relates to the Jewish Shema, the Lord is one, or the Christian creed that God’s unity is expressed precisely in Trinity, three in one and one in three.
In order to be in relationship, you have to be somebody. Emptying yourself of all commitments, beliefs, boundaries, simply mimicking the other is no sort of relationship at all at the interpersonal level. So too to practice interfaith relationship, having a sense of what you believe, why you do what you do, who you are, is actually essential to forming the relationship. And also trusting that the one you are relating to also is a “self,” an “other.” Interfaith relationship is about the coming together of different religious “personalities.”
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This becomes particularly important when we begin discussing “multiple religious belonging.”
It is one of the primary Christian virtues that teaches us to approach other religions hospitably rather than antagonistically. “If Christians are to exercise a virtue that lies at the core of Christian tradition–namely, hospitality–we must be prepared to receive as well as to give” (Thatamanil, 17).
Multiple religious participation has often been characterized by theologians uncharitably as individualistic, simply religious consumers choosing from a smorgasbord of options. But in reality, many multiple religious practitioners do so not out of hyper-individualism, but rather out of a deep love for more than one tradition.
I have seen this increasingly in my ministry as a pastor. Not only do I have Christian parishioners who practice yoga. I also have members who attend synagogue, identify as Buddhist, and connect with Islam and other religious traditions. Others understand themselves as pagan and Christian, or even atheist and Christian.
I love the work of John Thatamanil in particular on this point. What I love about his work is its offer of theological equipment for consideration of the ways we learn more about ourselves by learning from others.
He writes, “We can learn to love and love to learn from what is not already our own. After generations of seeking to convert the world and thereby erase religious diversity–a project that has underwritten all manner of colonial violence–the time has come to receive rather than propagate, to reorient Christian communities toward the virtues of humility and hospitality rather than an aggressive ‘giving’ that believes it has nothing to receive. What is a closed hand that is unwilling to receive but a fist” (3)
Much of the reflection on the religious traditions of others has historically been focused on simply understanding the neighbor in their difference. There is nothing particularly wrong with that approach, if the goal is simply tolerance and understanding.
But if inter religious learning is “holy labor,” as Thatamanil argues, then we need our neighbor’s faith and traditions in order to understand our own.
Perhaps it can be stated this way: I only become a Christian by moving in humility toward my neighbor’s wisdom, born out of their religious tradition.
I do not become a Christian by converting them to Christianity. I become a Christian through my own ongoing conversion attempting to love more deeply what my neighbor loves.
Honestly, this should come as no surprise to Christians. Christianity did not emerge wholesale as a complete religion sui generis. Christianity is, rather, grounded in Judaism, which was previously shaped by traditions like Zoroastrianism. Christianity was then shaped by Hellenestic forms of thought and religious practice.
Christianity itself could not and would not be what it is apart from those traditions.
As we now emerge into a 21st century that is more religiously diverse than ever before, we can claim those origins, and as Thatamanil argues, “make it possible for the faithful to conceive of religious diversity as promise rather than problem, as resource rather than as rupture” (29).
He writes,”
“One problem in particular captures my attention: the notion that stark and immutable lines separate ‘the religions.’ Christian reflection has, from its inception, been situated in a world of fluid crosscutting differences. Indeed, it would be possible to craft a history of Christian thought and practice written as a series of interactions with and transmutations of movements and traditions that Christians have come to demarcate as non-Christian. Such a history would demonstrate not only that many of the central categories, practices, and symbols of Christian life are borrowed from Hellenistic philosophical schools, mystery religions, and of course, most vitally from what we now call ‘Judaism,’ but that for long stretches of history, no clearly defined and rigid boundaries existed between ‘Christianity’ and those traditions we now take to be Christianity’s others” (110).
Inter-religious learning has been a hallmark of some of the most transformative religious movements of our time. Just think of Martin Luther King Jr’s leadership of the Civil Rights movement in conversation with Mohandas Gandhi.
Thatamanil asks: “Although it is widely known that King marched alongside and worked with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and admired the work of Thich Naht Hanh–so much so that he nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize–why haven’t we named this moment as inter religious?” (197).
And this tantalizing point: “What is incontestable is King’s claim that Gandhi was the first to demonstrate and embody [a vision of Jesus as engaged in collective nonviolent resistance] on a mass sociopolitical scale and so vindicate any political reading of Jesus that might have been available prior to Gandhi. That a Hindu should be the first to accomplish this revolutionary work is what strikes King as remarkable. To assert the Christianness of Gandhi then is not so much an attempt to baptized him but is instead an act of affirmation that a Hindu understood and performed the true meaning of Jesus’s life and teachings more deeply than any Christian had heretofore done” (206).
Christians can practice theological vulnerability. We signal willingness to entertain the possibility that others may be able to shed more light even on our most precious categories than we can manage when left to our own devices.
What if the calling of our time, a calling from the Holy Herself, is to adventure and sojourn into new religious terrain, not now to convert and to conquer as Western Christians once did, but to humbly and hospitably receive other wisdoms.
And intriguingly, might that be the most Trinitarian practice of all?