The gospel and interfaith understanding: how do we hold them together?

How do we Lutherans hold the gospel and interfaith understanding together? In my literalistic mind, this question conjures up the image of a mime wrestling to carry two enormous, invisible burdens, each one by itself almost too large to grip securely. When one burden begins to fall, he turns his efforts frantically to that one, but invariably while his attention is distracted the other package starts to slip as well. And so the struggle continues, humorous in its earnest and immobilizing effort.

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Perhaps it is no wonder that some Christians try to simplify things by refusing to carry more than one of the two. There are those who suspect that our commitment to the gospel will be compromised if we give a sympathetic hearing to different faith traditions, or who reject the idea that others' encounters with the sacred have anything significant to offer us, since the gospel of Jesus Christ is God's definitive revelation to humanity. On the other extreme, there are those who place Christianity within the pluralism of world religions, each one an autonomous and equally viable path. All value judgments and attempts to share the "good news" that we experience are in bad form, because these recall arrogant and exploitative modes of relating to other faiths that have unfortunately been part of Christian history.

Neither of these simpler options really works for Lutherans, though. We like our theology complex, preferably punctuated with at least one Latin phrase containing the word simul. Not only do we want to hold on, simultaneously, to both the gospel and interfaith understanding; we find it impossible to do otherwise. It may be a struggle to articulate precisely how Christianity and other faiths relate to each other, but here we stand, committed to the struggle. We cannot do otherwise because we cannot let go of two central convictions.

1. The first is that the gospel is true. We confess that Jesus Christ, through his life and ministry, his crucifixion and resurrection, and his abiding presence among us and in all creation as the divine Word, concretely and fully incarnates the good news of God's transformative involvement with all aspects of the human condition and the whole world. The gospel has the power to change individual lives and entire communities with its vision of God's all-inclusive love that Christians are called and equipped by the Holy Spirit to embody as "salt," "light," and "leaven" for the world. We do not need to be defensive about the gospel, to protect it from comparisons that inevitably arise from exposure to other faiths. It is a unique and compelling gift offered to all of humankind.

2. The second belief is that the gospel has a cosmic, universal dimension that is much larger than Christianity has ever been or can ever be. God is present and active in all of humanity, in all of creation. There is no place, no life, no culture, no religion from which God is absent--hidden, perhaps, but not absent. In the New Testament, we see the example of Jesus reaching out to those outside of his faith community, and we too are called to recognize and serve the neighbor beyond our borders. When we hear Jesus refer to his "other sheep," to the "many rooms" that he goes to prepare, and to all those who will come "from east and west," we have intimations of the breadth of the gospel. In taking other religions seriously we honor our neighbors, learn how to serve Christ in the world, and possibly discern how God is acting in other lives, other communities, other faiths.

I would like to tell you the story of how I took hold of the gospel through a personal interfaith encounter with a Muslim family, and then I would like to hold up the particular case of Christian-Jewish relations as a positive model for interfaith understanding that, far from hampering Christianity's embodiment of the gospel, definitely enhances it. You might wonder how these two parts of my presentation are related. In my own life, my experience in East Jerusalem led indirectly to my involvement in Jewish-Christian dialogue. More generally, what follows are two instances, one of a personal and one of a communal nature, of holding the gospel and interfaith understanding together.

How I took hold of the gospel through a personal interfaith encounter

My conviction that the gospel and interfaith understanding belong together is based as much on personal experience as on theological and biblical grounds. About twenty years ago, after graduating from Luther College with an highly enjoyable but impractical art major, I spent a year drifting in Israel, finally milking cows on Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev. After months among secular Israelis, I decided that it was time to read the New Testament again to see what fresh sense I could make of Jesus.

While in the Old City of Jerusalem shopping for gifts to take back to the United States I met a Muslim man named Adel in his Hebron pottery and glass shop. He saw the little green New Testament in my pocket, and we talked about the significance of Jesus in world history. He especially appreciated my equivocations about the divinity of Christ and quickly invited me to stay with his family to learn about Islam.

For almost a month I enjoyed my days accompanying Adel's wife, Sarah, as she cooked wonderful dishes, cared for her young children, and visited with relatives and neighbors. Perhaps the most revolutionary thing I learned from Sarah was modesty in dress. From the respectability of long sleeves and skirts, I realized that I had been walking around half naked. The family gave me an Arabic name and found me a handsome prospective husband. Adel and his brother took me to meet with a Sheikh on the Mount of Olives who had a special ministry to English-speaking foreigners. In every possible way, even ways that I did not associate with the concept of "religion," they were sharing with me the "good news" of their faith.

I want to emphasize this last point. We Christians like to talk about serving the neighbor, including the neighbor from outside our own community. That was not what was happening here. I was not serving anybody. Rather, through this family I experienced unmerited, unconditional love. They did not owe me anything; they did not even know me! Yet they took me into their modest home and showed me the most touching kindness, familiarity, and attention to all my needs.

We should not always imagine ourselves as the dispensers of God's mercy to the world. Sometimes we get grace.

My Muslim hosts urged me to join them, to cross the line from interfaith understanding to conversion. There was much that pulled at my heart: the call to prayer throughout the day, the incredible hospitality always marked by sweet mint tea and spiced coffee, the strong sense of family and neighborhood, the blank white walls free of iconographic art, the serenity in the faces of many who "surrendered" to the will of Allah, the all-powerful, the all-knowing, the all-merciful, the one God with so many beautiful names.

In the end, much to my mother's relief, I returned to the U.S. and, as an adult, consciously affirmed my membership in the body of Christ. Certainly part of why I did not become Muslim had to do with the Lutheran heritage of my family, and part was cultural, including the role of women in society. But there was something more, something that I was not able to articulate at the time and can articulate only partially here. Was it the compelling, paradoxical vision that Christianity offers of God's strength even in human weakness, of divine presence even in tragedy and misery, of new life even in the face of death? No doubt that figured into my decision. But even more. I wanted to go to church. Was I missing the proclaimed Word of the sermon and the sacrament of Holy Communion, the "marks" of the church? Without question! What I really missed, though, was congregational singing, which to this day touches me so deeply that I am often unable to participate because of my tears. And I haven't even mentioned yet coffee hour in the church basement!

I felt bad that I disappointed my Muslim friends, that I could not help them reach their heavenly reward through my conversion. But they forgave me. We remained friends, Muslims and Christians, and we have kept in touch over the intervening years. Knowing that they are over there in East Jerusalem, in Ras Al-Amoud looking down on Al-Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, has lent an immediacy to the recent escalation of violence in that region of the world.

In the wake of my eye-opening experience, I planned to go to graduate school for comparative study of the great Western monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Things worked out a little differently, as they sometimes do, and I found myself studying the Hebrew Bible with a mixed group of Christian and Jewish scholars and fellow students. Through this experience I became involved with Jewish-Christian dialogue. It is curious that my encounter with a Muslim family led indirectly to my engagement with Jewish-Christian relations. Or perhaps it is a sign that three-way conversations between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim partners should be the norm.

Not everyone must travel such a circuitous route through another religious tradition in order to return, rededicated to one's own faith. This personal anecdote emphasizes that interfaith understanding is not necessarily hostile to a commitment to the Christian gospel but in fact can deepen it. I am grateful for my Muslim friends who so hospitably shared with me their faith, practices, and family life. I am equally grateful for the religious experience and education that my own family and church gave me when I was a child in Seguin, Texas, and that Luther College provided once I left home. This foundation helped me put my experiences in East Jerusalem in perspective by grounding my identity as a daughter of a God deeply involved with all of humanity and with the whole world, a God whom Christians know most intimately through Jesus. The same foundation allowed me to recognize my hosts as children of the same God, albeit with different modes of perception, worship, and being.

My story is not exceptional, save perhaps the extraordinary generosity of my hosts, whose immersion style of evangelism presents us with a challenging model to consider. In this pluralistic age ordinary people, like me, like you, are encountering the world's religions personally on a daily basis. Our neighbors, friends, business and community acquaintances, even family members, have become invitations to interfaith understanding. Especially since September 11, 2001, there has been a growing recognition that the religious diversity of our world cannot be ignored.

The reality and opportunity of pluralism today places an urgent imperative on all of us involved in theological education. We need to redouble our efforts to prepare Christians, both clergy and laity, for the challenge of interfaith encounters that they are sure to have. We Christians need to be knowledgeable about Christianity, its scriptures and creeds, its history and diverse forms in different cultures, its beliefs and practices, its ethics and theology, so that we have the resources to be mature partners in interfaith dialogue. We need to know something about our neighbors' faiths so that we have a basis for conversation and interaction around religious matters. In our churches, schools, colleges, seminaries, and summer camps we need to offer the type of education that makes it possible for individuals, congregations, and communities to hold the gospel and interfaith understanding together.

Fostering an informed priesthood of all believers capable of constructive interfaith dialogue and cooperation is one of the greatest challenges of our time. I urge each of us in our particular contexts to discern and promote opportunities for positive interfaith encounter, including educational forums, social events, service projects, and longer-term associations that answer the needs of the greater community and build up mutual understanding among our distinctive communities of faith.

Christian-Jewish relations as a positive model for interfaith understanding

From my work with Jewish-Christian relations (most recently on the ELCA Consultative Panel on Lutheran-Jewish Relations) I have come to regard developments in this area as a positive model for interfaith understanding. From the Christian perspective, the new attitudes and behaviors that we have cultivated toward our Jewish neighbors have not detracted from Jesus' gospel of love but rather have allowed us to experience and to exemplify it more fully.

Christianity's relationship with Judaism is of course a unique case within the community of world religions because of our shared historical origins, our common scriptures and theological concepts, and our mutual influence upon each other over centuries of living closely together. But, as we also know, far too much of our history together has involved a tragic misuse of power by the dominant Christian cultures of the West. Most lamentably, it took the destruction of one-third of world Jewry in the Shoah or "catastrophe" of World War II before Christians finally recognized in their theology and treatment of the Jewish people a dangerous distortion of the Christian gospel. During the last half century, the church has expressed remorse over past injustices, prejudices, and injuries and has worked hard to build relations with the Jewish community that are respectful, mutual, and beneficial.

Far from threatening Christianity's integrity, the process of entering into a new relationship with Jews and Judaism has had very positive results. We certainly do not want to evaluate our encounters with other faith traditions exclusively on the basis of what they can accomplish for us. But in this discussion on how to hold the gospel and interfaith understanding together, it is worth emphasizing that improved Jewish-Christian relations have not diminished our identity as a gospel people. Our interfaith dialogue with Judaism has set us again on a needed course of reformation, through which we have been abundantly blessed. These blessings can be summarized under three headings--three Cs: correction, connection, and construction.

Correction

By squarely facing up to the history of misunderstanding and hatred for which it bears much responsibility, the church has been able to repent of past wrongs and resolve to do better in the future. Christians have acknowledged their culpability in creating conditions that made the holocaust possible as well as the compliance and silence of too many church members in the face of terrible atrocities. Noteworthy in the present Lutheran context is the "Declaration to the Jewish Community" adopted by the ELCA Church Council in 1994, which repudiates "Luther's anti-Judaic diatribes" and the later anti-Semitism that they fueled and expresses our "urgent desire" for Christian faith lived out "with love and respect for the Jewish people" (http://www.elca.org/ecumenical/interfaithrelations/jewish/declaration.html).

Because the roots of some of the negative stereotypes of Jews and Judaism are in the New Testament itself, a concerted effort has been made to set these harsh words within their original polemical contexts without translating them into anti-Semitism. Characterizations of the Pharisees as legalistic frauds or the entire Jewish people as responsible for the death of Jesus must be seen as arising from a bitter parting of the ways between Christianity and Judaism a generation or more after Jesus' death. I myself am not sure that this historical contextualization goes far enough. In any event, our difficult scriptural texts must be not passed on uncritically in sermons and religious education.

With these and other needed corrections, the church has begun to free itself from a shameful legacy. We need to ensure that these dramatic developments become known to all Christians and to the general public so that their cathartic effect is not limited to scholars and pastors.

Connection

In recent decades, Christianity's connections with Judaism have been rediscovered. The Jewishness of Jesus, his disciples, and the early Christian movement have received attention as have the Jewish roots of Christian liturgy. Also, early Jewish and Christian styles of biblical interpretation were discovered to have much in common.

This last point engages me personally and academically. I remember how exciting it was in graduate school to explore Jewish midrash, a creative type of biblical interpretation that brings the Bible into conversation with later rabbinic values. A particularly compelling example revisits the defeat of the Egyptians at the sea:

When [the Egyptian armies were drowning in the sea] the ministering
angels broke into a song [of victory] before the Holy One Blessed Be He.
The Holy One Blessed Be He said to them, "The works of my hands are
drowning in the sea, and you sing a song [of victory] before me!"
(Talmud Bavli, Sanhedrin 39b)

This midrash rejects the idea that God's concern could be limited to only one people, even the people that he was delivering from oppression, and says rather that it extends to all of creation, even Israel's drowning enemies. It expresses a profound theological idea in a fanciful, narrative fashion.

Early Christian exegesis does the same thing. When Paul claims that the spiritual rock that accompanied Israel to give them water in their wilderness wanderings was in fact Christ (1 Cor 10:1-5), he is making an important claim through midrash. Just as the rabbinic midrash rejects the idea that God is limited to only one people, Paul denies that Christ could be limited in his involvement with humanity to the earthly life of Jesus and claims that he was present and life-giving from ancient times, including in the form of a rock wandering alongside the Israelites in the wilderness!

Through studying midrash, I found myself freed from a modernist tendency to want to find the one, "original" meaning of scripture. I was able to enjoy the same type of highly imaginative yet serious exegesis practiced by early Christians.

In addition to these ancient connections, contemporary connections have been forged between members of two mature faiths that over the centuries have developed quite distinctive forms of belief and practice. The ELCA's 1998 "Guidelines for Lutheran-Jewish Relations" (http://www.elca.org/ecumenical/interfaithrelations/jewish/guidelines.html) contains suggestions for fostering Lutheran-Jewish dialogue and cooperation today. Personal connections between real people from our different faith communities are at the very heart of interfaith understanding. Without these face-to-face relationships within our particular social and cultural contexts, our interest in interfaith understanding is doomed to remain a disembodied intellectual exercise with little substantive impact.

Construction

Our interfaith relations have led us not to discard our traditional theological insights but to reconsider and reformulate them in light of developments in Jewish-Christian dialogue. For example, as we begin through interfaith understanding to recognize the vitality and spiritual richness of contemporary Judaism, it becomes impossible to maintain old supersessionist ways of thinking, which viewed the new covenant in Christ as a superior replacement of the old covenant of Moses. The same is true for the simplistic understanding of Christianity as a fulfillment of all of God's promises to Israel, since we discover that rabbinic Judaism also continues the biblical legacy in a different way.

Of special interest for Lutherans is the constructive potential of Jewish-Christian dialogue to contribute to our understanding of the relationship between law and gospel. In Judaism, Torah (translated often as "law" but better translated as "instruction" or "teaching") has a positive significance as the divine instruction that provides a way of life. Understanding the fuller sense of Torah in Judaism can prevent Christians from projecting charges of legalism onto Judaism instead of recognizing this as a common tendency within all religious systems, including Lutheran Christianity. We can recognize that Christians, too, have our "divine instruction," our way of life, in the person of Jesus, who provides us with ethical teachings and a positive model for being in the world.

"Talking Points: Topics in Christian-Jewish Relations" (http://www.elca.org/ecumenical/interfaithrelations/jewish/talkingpoints/index.html) was issued by the Department of Ecumenical Affairs of the ELCA to stimulate "discussion and debate on theological issues in Christian-Jewish relations." The Consultative Panel who produced these Talking Points hopes that they are successful in prompting reflection and new formulations of Lutheran theology in light of the present reality of Jewish-Christian relations.

The tremendous growth in Jewish-Christian relations does not mean that all of our differences have been eliminated; they never will be in this world! Nor does it mean that we have resolved all of our difficult issues. The current situation in the state of Israel is one such issue, although on this issue there is also much dissent internally, within the Jewish community. In this time of increased interfaith understanding we enjoy improved personal relations, a cordial civic life together, and cooperative projects in areas including church-state relations, ecological renewal, and social justice. On a more theological level, the vitality of our two distinctive religious communities, the Christian church and contemporary Judaism, attests that God's empowering presence is not confined within the borders of any single faith.

The positive developments in Jewish-Christian understanding may provide a model and an incentive for other interfaith relations. If Christians can overcome the grievous mistakes of the past and begin a new, mutually respectful relationship with Jews and Judaism, it is certainly realistic to hope that our encounters with other world religions will similarly bear fruit. It may be that the beneficial three Cs--correction, connection, and construction--would accrue in other cases as well, enhancing our ability to live out the gospel of love toward the neighbor within a pluralistic society.

Not surprisingly, the Lutheran approach to holding the gospel and interfaith understanding together is likely to be some-what dialogical. As we continue to deepen our understanding of our neighbor's faith and learn to live in closer communion with the religions of the world, we find ourselves also needing to refine our understanding of the gospel and to build up the church as the body of Christ so that we are prepared to meet the other as mature partners in God's world. The gospel and interfaith understanding set up a constant motion outward and back in: outward toward the neighbor that Christ has sent us out to meet, love, serve, give witness to, and understand; back in, often with a better self-understanding through our encounter, to join with fellow Christians in hearing the word and participating in the sacraments, in studying scripture and enjoying Christian fellowship, in caring for each other and giving witness to the gospel within our community. Back and forth, without fear, because, whether we bond with our own community of faith or bridge with another community of faith, we live in the good news that God extends to all peoples.

How do we Lutherans hold the gospel and interfaith dialogue together? My answer is: enthusiastically, respectfully, joyously, with full confidence--in a word, boldly! Holding the gospel and interfaith understanding together is worth our best efforts. And we may take great comfort in our struggle to hold both "burdens" from the knowledge that, at a more fundamental level, we do not by ourselves hold anything together.

The good news is that the divine Word, revealed in Jesus Christ, holds everything together--all of us Lutherans, the larger Christian community, the other world religions, the whole creation. "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth [nor anything that may result from our sometimes clumsy attempts at interfaith understanding], nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom 8:38).

Esther M. Menn

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago