From Fear to Faith

I contributed this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

How do you talk to your friends about Jesus in multi-faith Southall? Answer, according to one six-year-girl, ‘I ask them, “What do you like about your God?” And then I say what I like about my God.’

I’ve been reminded of her response in recent weeks. The election of Sadiq Khan as the first Muslim mayor of a major western city was widely reported around the world. An internal review by the BBC has concluded that the Corporation’s output is too Christian, suggesting that Muslim, Hindu and Sikh faiths should get more airtime, while plans for new laws to tackle extremism were announced in this week’s Queen’s Speech.

Whatever we make of these issues – and responses vary – they are a reminder, if we need it, of the religiously plural nature of contemporary society. In many parts of the UK, through globalisation and migration, trade and technology, we increasingly live and work in close proximity to people who are adherents of different world faiths.

It’s not the first time the church has carried out its mission in a pluralistic context. Christianity was born into such a situation, and has faced the challenge many times in its history.

That challenge also brings opportunities in public life. In Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World, Christian theologian Miroslav Volf argues that world religions can contribute to societal wellbeing not by one winning out over the others or by their amalgamation into a common ‘essence’, but by the recognition that each carries within itself something of benefit to which its adherents can appeal, which outsiders can recognise as they engage in conversation with each other.

Of course, truth claims about Christ and salvation matter. Being civil doesn’t require us to leave our Christian convictions at the front door of any discussion. On the contrary, it’s only as we engage in conversation from a firm stance of faith in Jesus and his lordship over the whole of life that we’re able to find places to connect with others, confident that the gospel answers the deep longings of men and women even while it challenges the way those longings are understood.

The danger would be to dig in or fight back, as if there was no other way but to respond in fear. A six-year-old girl in Southall would beg to differ.

The Woolf Institute

A friend recently alerted me to the existence of the Woolf Institute. According to its website:

‘The purpose of the Woolf Institute is to serve the public good. The Institute studies how relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims can enhance our understanding of key concepts of public life: community and identity, mutual respect, personal responsibility, and social solidarity. Combining theology with the social sciences and the humanities, the Woolf Institute seeks to strengthen the ethical framework that is needed for our political, economic and social life.’

Among resources it produces is an annual magazine, Perspectives, which includes individual issues devoted to Faith and Narratives, Movement and Migration, Translation and Interpretation, Marginalised Minorities, and Faith and Reason.

International Bulletin of Missionary Research 35, 4 (October 2011) on Religions and the Common Good

October 2001’s issue of International Bulletin of Missionary Research (available here, via a free subscription) carries main articles on the theme of ‘religions and common good’, including one by Terry Muck on Christian witness in a multi-religious world, and one by Lamin Sanneh on religious freedom and citizenship.

Lauren F. Winner on Jewish-Christian Dialogue

Lauren F. Winner, ‘Terms of Engagement: Where Things Stand in Jewish-Christian Dialogue’, Books & Culture (May/June 2009).

Lauren Winner offers some reflections on the following three books:

Gustav Niebuhr, Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America (New York: Viking, 2008).

David Novak, Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

Randi Rashkover and C.C. Pecknold (eds.), Liturgy, Time and the Politics of Redemption (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).

The books are the most recent of a substantial wave of interest over the last fifteen years or so among theologians (not to mention biblical scholars) on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, with a number of theologians being committed to dialogue to explore what an anti-supersessionist Christian theology might look like, and to see what Christianity and Judaism can learn from one another on how to speak about the God of Israel. This turn in theology is associated with Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, Scott Bader-Saye, and Kendall Soulen, among others.

Winner notes that on Gustav Niebuhr’s account, interfaith encounters remain largely social – getting together to know one another better, and pursuing some common civic goal. One of the central questions, according to Niebhur, is ‘what does it mean to be different together?’ – thus raising explicit, though risky, theological conversation.

David Novak’s work gathers some fruits of his thirty-year engagement with Christians, with his central vision that when Jews talk about Christians and Christians talk about Jews, we do so by avoiding saying things that the other religion and its adherents and practitioners wouldn’t recognise. Though this appears somewhat obvious, Winner avers that it would have deep implications for how we speak about Judaism in the academy and the church, even down to avoiding talking about ‘the Jewish faith’ (which is tacitly Christianising)… Jewish people, sure… Jewish practice, great. But not Jewish faith. Novak’s guidelines, however, have tended to bracket points of disagreement that are specific to Judaism and Christianity, focusing on commonalities rather than discussing salvation, the identity of Christ, etc.

The collection of essays edited by Randi Rashkover and C.C. Pecknold ‘suggests that risky, theological engaged Jewish-Christian conversations may be possible when they emerge from our shared (though also different) practices’.

Winner concludes that Christians need to participate in these conversations ‘not out of some generalized pluralistic sense that diversity always enriches conversation (which may or may not be true), but out of a theologically particular sense that without Jewish conversation partners, Christians’ theological speech – that is, Christians’ claims about the God of Israel – risks hubris and possibly serious error’. Putting it more positively, ‘we need Jewish conversation partners to help us understand what we mean when we say that the Christological event is informed by the God who elected Israel’.