Where is God? Engaging a religiously charged, post-secular world.

All immigrants take with them something that is part of the "old" world from which they came. What they take with them may not be what they would have wanted to be at the core of who they become in the new context. Similarly, what they may have wished to take with them to form the core of who they become, because it forms the core of who they are, may not really get taken along on the journey. The new context has a decisive shaping role in what they become. This is a fascinating and complex process that applies to what we might bring with us in our theological journey. New contexts present new and different challenges. We are now in a post-11 September 2001 context with its multifaceted challenges.

In that light, as I reflect on the topic, "Where is God? Engaging a religiously charged, post-secular world," three scenes from my past in Guyana come to mind. Not too long after my wife, May, and I arrived in Guyana, from graduate study in Scotland, in early September 1980, I had a conversation with one of my father's closest friends who was a Muslim. Uncle Gafoor lived directly across from Redeemer Lutheran Church, where I had grown up and where in about three weeks I was to be ordained and installed as pastor. He had known all the previous pastors--all Lutheran missionaries from the ULCA/LCA-- and had an opinion about the ability of each to relate to the multireligious, racially mixed community. In our conversation he asked me about my return to live and work in Guyana, which was experiencing difficult times on several fronts. As we talked about my work as pastor, Uncle Gafoor said to me, "Son, I pray that God the Almighty will bless you and your wife...." How should a Lutheran Christian understand this bl essing from a Muslim?

At the Service of Word and Sacrament in which I was ordained, on 30 September 1980, the congregation included a number of my relatives, both Christian and Hindu. My Christian relatives were second- and first-generation converts from Hinduism. Like my Christian relatives, my Hindu relatives were delighted to be present to witness my ordination. Most of the more than twenty had hardly ever attended a Christian worship service before. For the most part, they silently participated in the service.

At the conclusion of the service, I greeted the congregation at the door. In the presence of several of my Hindu relatives, my maternal great aunt said to me, "Son, we are proud of you tonight. Remember that you are only fulfilling in the Christian way what your caste means." She had interpreted my call and ordination as pastor in Hindu terms: I was a Brahmin living out my priestly calling in a Christian way. Did she have any right to interpret my Christian identity in Hindu terms? In a Lutheran theological framework, is there a legitimate place for her Hindu interpretation of my call to preach the Word and administer the sacraments?

It was probably during the first three months of my pastorate that I communed a lapsed member who had become a practicing Hindu. I had been told that she was no longer living as a Christian. Her religious background was quite interreligious: one side of her family was Muslim, and she herself had been a Muslim; the other side of her family was Hindu, to which she had recently turned, after having lived for some years as a baptized Christian. She had come to church that day, even though she had become a practicing Hindu. As she explained to me after the service, when she heard my invitation to all baptized Christians, she decided to partake of the body and blood of our Lord. What in Lutheran understanding of the Christian faith should we appeal to, in order to respond to the theological and pastoral dilemma this situation presented?

When we turn to the contemporary religious landscape in the U.S.A., we are not thrown into a world in which only intra-Lutheran or even intra-Christian theological and ecclesial questions legitimately can be delineated as primary and interreligious questions delineated as secondary. To do that would be a violation of the Christian message, the center of which is the Word become flesh and the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Indeed, the challenges that the three scenarios presented in Guyana exist right here in the U.S. Those and other scenarios beg a Christian articulation of what the gospel is.

A new religious landscape

We cannot turn to the new religious landscape in twenty-first century U.S. without taking notice of the religious character of the interpretations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the USSR, and the demise of almost all of the communist world. I have yet to find someone who has said that he or she expected the incredible events of 1989-1991 to occur when they did and in the manner in which they took place. The world watched in amazement as the world of communism, socialism, and Marxism collapsed. While the Western world was geographically removed from it, nevertheless our lives were shaped by it. We lived in an ideological world that was divided between East and West. That divide had a decisive shaping influence on North and South. U.S. policy was so overridingly determined by the Cold War that we were unprepared for the emergence of the "new" world of post-1989.

To many in the U.S. and around the world, the collapse of the Soviet empire was the unmistakable consequence of God's justifiable wrath on godless communism and its perpetrators. Jubilant and triumphant shouts were heard all over the globe, especially in the U.S. The jury is still out as to what the ultimate causes of the collapse were, but, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet empire, religious and nonreligious people recognized that we were witnesses to something extraordinary in human history.

As opponents and sympathizers, religious and nonreligious, continue to wonder why the Soviet system ended so dramatically, there are many crucial lessons to be learned. Here, we note a primary lesson: where the writings of a thinker, like Karl Marx, contain the basis of an internal critique of his or her own blueprint of how the world should be recreated, those writings should not be ignored or suppressed. Those who set about to implement their mentor's ideas and/or are apologists for those ideas must take seriously those seeds of criticism. Indeed, one of the strengths of any kind of movement or any thinker's worldview is the fact of the recognition of the contradictions between ideal and concrete reality and whether the thinker himself or herself provides ways of internally critiquing both excesses and distortions. While the early works of Karl Marx contained the germs of an internal critique of Marxism, that critique was not employed with openness and welcome. Rather, it was stifled, and those who dared to use it were condemned as un-Marxist and enemies of the state. Marx's critique of capitalist society in the nineteenth century in terms of alienation of the worker applied at least as much to those societies that were ideologically indebted to him.

Despite Marx's avowed atheism and the celebration of the discrediting of his ideas through the demise of the Soviet empire, Marx may be theologically relevant in our twenty-first--century world of unchecked globalization. For example, his concept of alienation can be critical to understanding the fragmentation of human community. Of course, there are shortcomings endemic in Marx's Weltanschauung. However, his critique of the emerging industrial capitalism, in which he saw the worker as being alienated by the productive process, presents a theological form of the No of the law. Yes, it is limited. But that does not mean we should dismiss it. (1)

If using Marx against Marx mighthave proved salutary and liberating, using Luther to critique Luther in order to engage our religiously charged, post-secular world might be crucial and necessary. Indeed, it is crucial and necessary. But before we consider that theme, a word needs to be said about the religiously pluralistic world that has emerged in the U.S. (and Canada) that presents its own challenges and possibilities, including the challenge of redefining friends and enemies, tolerance and religious fidelity.

In her insightful and invaluable work, A New Religious America, Diana L. Eck provides her readers with an alluring, shocking, sobering, and challenging portrait of the new religious landscape in the U.S. There is no denying that the United States of America is now "the most religiously diverse nation on earth." (2) Of course, religious diversity has been a part of U.S. life for a long time. But now, it is more obvious, and it is moving at an accelerated pace. Eck writes,

The immigrants of the last three decades, however, have expanded the diversity of our religious life dramatically, exponentially. Buddhists have come from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and Korea; Hindus from India, East Africa, and Trinidad; Muslims from Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Middle East, and Nigeria; Sikhs and Jams from India; and Zoroastrians from both India and Iran. Immigrants from Haiti and Cuba have brought Afro-Caribbean traditions, blending both African and Catholic symbols and images. New Jewish immigrants have come from Russia and the Ukraine, and the internal diversity of American Judaism is greater than ever before. The face of American Christianity has also changed with large Latino, Filipino, and Vietnamese Catholic communities; Chinese, Haitian, and Brazilian Pentecostal communities; Korean Presbyterians, Indian Mar Thomas, and Egyptian Copts. In every city in the land church signboards display the meeting times of Korean or Latino congregations that nest within walls of ol d urban Protestant and Catholic churches. While central chapters of this book focus on the Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim streams of America's religious life, old and new, it is important to hold in mind that these are but part of a far more complex religious reality of encyclopedic dimensions. (3)

This religious, ethnic, and racial diversity is unprecedented in our history. What will this mean for us as "one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all"? What will it mean for the way we think theologically and missionally? Whose culture should be lifted up in the wider society? Whose culture is the most suited to be the bearer of the gospel of Jesus Christ? How might one be Christian and at the same time celebrate religious and cultural forms and rites which are of the world of the religions? Of course, these are not new questions. They pervade the biblical world, both of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. It has been customary to think of the world of the religions as either the world of the Western missionaries in far and distant lands or the one we encounter in our world religions classes. Now, religious diversity means real people and communities in our neighborhoods and workplaces who show their differentness in dress and worship.

For us to begin engaging this living reality of religious diversity, we will need to begin learning about one another's faith, beliefs, and practices. To live in isolation and ignorance will not be liberating; it will not foster hospitality and welcome and a sense of belonging. On the question of ignorance and lack of interaction, Eck writes,

But many, if not most, Christian, Jewish, or secular Americans have never visited a mosque or a Hindu or Buddhist temple. Many Americans are not so sure what Sikhs or Muslims believe, let alone Jams and Zoroastrians. Similarly, Muslim or Hindu Americans may have sketchy and stereotypical views of Christians and Jews. So where do we go from here? It's one thing to be unconcerned about or ignorant of Muslim or Buddhist neighbors on the other side of the world, but when Buddhists are our next-door neighbors, when our children are best friends with Muslim classmates, when a Hindu is running for a seat on the school committee, all of us have a new vested interest in our neighbors, both as citizens and as people of faith. (4)

One necessary step on the way to engaging our religiously charged, post-secular world is to consider theologically what in Christian faith would prompt us toward openness, hospitality, and welcome and what might hinder us from doing so. Given our confessional heritage and identity, Lutheran Christians would find it necessary to ask: What is there in Luther and the Confessions that would propel us outward to our neighbors of different faiths? Is there any basis in Luther and the Confessions for deeming such a stance anathema?

Bearing true witness: Luther as critic of Luther

Martin Luther's Explanation in his Small Catechism to the Eighth Commandment, "You are not to bear false witness against your neighbor," offers a provocative and illuminating basis for engaging our religiously charged, post-secular world. Indeed, Luther's own writings provide a crucial and suggestive internal critique of the contradictions in his theological articulations. When Luther writes, "We are to fear and love God, so that we do not tell lies about our neighbors, betray or slander them or destroy their reputations. Instead we are to come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light," (5) there is no question that this is first and foremost a theological statement. (6)

With both the overriding theological character of Luther's view of the world and his sanguine word on pursuing the neighbor's good in mind, we will look briefly at Luther's attitude towards the Turks and the Jews. We will consider his attitude toward each group, using his Explanation of the Eighth Commandment as our theological gauge. Our concern is to find ways in which we might fruitfully engage Luther in our pluralistic world. Luther's world of the sixteenth century, it needs to be remembered, had its own peculiar features of diversity, religious and political.

We are all aware of the three responses to religious pluralism that are typically lifted up: exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist. While there are some variations in how each is defined, the exclusivist position can be characterized as holding that Jesus Christ alone is the way of salvation, God's way of salvation. There is nothing saving or even revelatory at all in other religions. Some would even say that it is only in hearing and believing in Jesus that one has salvation, reconciliation, etc. Exclusivists assert that salvation is through Christ alone. Inclusivists also hold "in Christ alone," but they are open to some kind of "partial" divine revelation and some semblance of saving revelation in other religions. In Christ there is a way of seeing other religions as bearing some sense of the saving reality of God. Finally, pluralists, among whom are notably John Hick (of the Reformed tradition) and Paul Knitter (of the Roman Catholic tradition), hold that Jesus Christ is God's saving revelation for Christians only, but there are equally valid saving revelation(s) in other religions. Pluralists insist on the parity of all religions.

When you think of these three positions, where should we locate Martin Luther? We can safely say the pluralist position would not be where Luther should be located. He was not a pluralist. There are two reasons for this conclusion. First, that was not his question. We are in the first decade of the twenty-first century; he lived in the sixteenth century. His was not the question of which position to hold: exclusivist, inclusivist, pluralist, or other. The pivotal question for him was: How do I find a gracious God? Perhaps more important, however, is that at the center of his theology and faith is his understanding of justification, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus. If justification is through Christ alone, then one really cannot argue for a pluralist position as being authentically where Luther was. It is an open question as to whether we can say definitively that he was an exclusivist not an inclusivist, or vice versa. This is where we have a creative opening to engage people of other faiths, without b earing false witness on Luther and the gospel as articulated in justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Luther was an "occasional" theologian--that is, his theological responses were always addressed to the questions that arose in his engagement with the biblical and other texts, personal existential struggles, and those that opposed or supported him. In his own way, he was a contextual theologian. For him, the papacy was the internal enemy of Christ and the gospel, while the Turks and Islam were external enemies of Christ and the gospel. At the same time, Luther regarded the Turks as the wrath of God--he does not say the wrath of Allah--inflicted on Christians who know the gospel but yet have despised it.

In addition, it is fair to conclude that Luther's understanding of God's hidden work might mean that it would be better to live under a good Turkish ruler than under an unjust Christian ruler. The reason for his preference was theological--one might suggest practical, but it was theological. In God's twofold rule in the kingdom on the left and the kingdom on the right, a Turkish ruler, a Muslim, exercising God's rule in the left, can in fact rule justly as God's agent. We need to keep in mind Luther's bold approbation, even when we recognize that he entirely feared the advancing Turks moving across Germany, Hungary, Austria, and other places.

With Jews and Muslims, Christians share the confession of the unity of God, the one Creator. For Christians, this one God is confessed to be essentially triune, one-in-three, three-in-one. When we meet and engage one another as Muslims, Jews, and Christians, we always come in the Name of the Almighty. For Christians, the Almighty is known uniquely and decisively in Jesus Christ. So, Christians can just as well say, we come in the Name of Jesus, the Word-become-flesh, the crucified and risen Lord. Moreover, Christians can also just as well say we meet and engage one another because the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, has moved us all to do so.

In his discussion of the prayer of unity in John 17, which Christians interpret as an inner-trinitarian prayer, Luther observes that the prayer affects the Father and that Christ's divinity is extrapolated from the power to give life. (7) The Father is known for us, pro nobis, only in Christ. We cannot apprehend God in God's nakedness outside of Christ, who is always God "clothed" for us. The glory of the Father and the glory of the Son are inseparable from each other. The glory of the Father and Son is made known throughout the world by the Holy Spirit. The glory of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the glory of the Triune God.

Luther's two treatises on the Jews, "That Jesus was born a Jew" and "On the Jews and their Lies," written in 1523 and 1543 respectively, present us with the unavoidable dilemma of how to think of them in light of Luther's Explanation to the Eighth Commandment. In the hope that a gentle, loving, and patient approach toward "the Jews [who] are of the lineage of Christ" (8) would lead to their conversion in great numbers, the gracious and generous tone of Luther's 1523 treatise contrasts starkly with the harsh, even brutal, tone of his 1543 treatise.

In the former, without compromising what he considered to be at the heart of the gospel, the Incarnation, Luther counsels that the Jews should "first be suckled with milk," that "one [should] deal gently with them and instruct them from Scripture; then some of them may come along," and "we must be guided in our dealings with them not by papal law but by the law of Christian love. We must receive them cordially, and permit them to trade and work with us, that they may have occasion and opportunity to associate with us, hear our Christian teaching, and witness our Christian life. If some of them should prove stiff-necked, what of it? After all, we ourselves are not all good Christians either." (9)

Luther's hope that many Jews would convert was never realized. In the ensuing years up until his death, his tone bears no resemblance to that in his Explanation to the Eighth Commandment. In the latter treatise, he writes,

Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously....God's wrath has consigned them to the presumption that their boasting, their conceit, their slander of God, their cursing of all people are a true and a great service rendered to God--all of which is very fitting and becoming to such noble blood of the fathers of the circumcised saints. This they believe despite the fact that they know they are steeped in vices....just as the devils themselves do.... Be on your guard against them! (10)

Luther was a product of his times. Stereotypes of and diatribes against one's enemies were the order of the day. But neither his stereotypes nor his diatribes should be reiterated today. One practical reason for leaving behind his stereotypes and diatribes is that we can easily break the law of the land. A primary theological reason is that his own Explanation of the Eighth Commandment shows that we would be violating God's word and God's will for the neighbor's good. Another reason is that use of such stereotypes and diatribes obscures the One whom we confess stands with and came and died for all, including those against whom we would thereby bear false witness.

In this fast-moving twenty-first century, in which so many of our securities are being pulled from under us, Lutheran Christians are faced with the challenge of finding a place to stand. Here, it is appropriate to ask: How definitive and decisive is the baptismal identity of Christians as they engage our religiously charged, post-secular world? Can we and should we lay aside our baptismal identity because of the One whose Name we bear and in whose Name we come and extend and receive hospitality? The identity of being baptized into Christ Jesus, the crucified and risen one, places upon all so named the radical ethical challenge of bearing witness to Jesus Christ, who died for those who are persecuted and victimized in his name or are relegated to the periphery of life and its bounties. There is the deep fear and suspicion that the radicality of baptismal identity is merely empty ritual language devoid of evocative eschatological power and ethical poignancy and relevance for today.

For Luther, God was most present where God appeared to be most absent. A theology of the cross is the theological way forward in engaging our religiously charged, post-secular world. Even if we were to disagree with Luther's solus Christus principle, to posit Luther as a pluralist would be to bear false witness to his theological commitment. Certainly, there is no place for his polemical, violent style today. His theological, existential, and hermeneutical use of the concept of "works righteousness" was crucial in his evaluation of the religious teachings and practices of Christians, Jews, and Muslims of his day. We cannot displace the cornerstone of his theology--justification sola gratia, solafide, solus Christus--and still claim that we are building on the center of his theological legacy. But to call into question his own failure to practice what he wrote about the Eighth Commandment is to be true to Luther and to positively engage our pluralistic world. His twofold use of Deus absconditus, and concepts such as larvae Dei, civil righteousness, as well as his accent on the particularities and concreteness of the Incarnation, offer fruitful and vital ways for such engagement.

This paper was originally presented at the Convocation of Teaching Theologians of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 16-18 August 2002, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota.

(1.) Cf. Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 4f., and Winston D. Persaud, The Theology of the Cross and Marx's Anthropology: A View from the Caribbean (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 9-65.

(2.) Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Now Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: Jar[er SanFrancisco, 2001), 4. In his work, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), Philip Jenkins offers a suggestive and promising picture of the dynamic growth and influence of the "Christianities" of new immigrants all over the globe, including the United States and Western Europe. On the "new" religious situation in the U.S., Jenkins writes: "In reality, the number of new immigrants who practice non-Christian religions is far less than is often supposed. The powerful Christian presence among East Asians means Buddhist or Taoist numbers are smaller than they might appear, and the numbers commonly given for American Muslims are likewise exaggerated. Although we read suggestions that the United States is home to as many as 8 million Muslims, actual numbers remain a good deal smaller than this, probably 4 mi llion or so, or 1.5 percent of the population. Though Americans tend to assume that all Middle Eastern immigrants must be Muslim, many Arab-Americans are in fact Christian. The United States has been a popular destination for better-off Arab Christians from Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Any likely Muslim growth through immigration will be far exceeded by the continuing Christian influx from Africa, Asia, and, above all, Latin America. To adapt Professor Eck's title, what we are rather seeing is How Mass Immigration Ensured that a Christian Country Has become an Even More Christian Country." Jenkins concludes: "For better or worse, in numerical terms at least, the United States is substantially a Christian country now, and Christian predominance is likely to be still more marked in decades to come. Out of all the leading Christian nations of the past two hundred years, the United States will be the last to occupy this role in the twenty-first century" (p. 105). Notwithstanding Jenkins' conclusions, the theolo gical challenges that arise from Eck's description of the U.S. remain.

(3.) Eck, A New Religious America, 3f.

(4.) Eck, A New Religious America, 5f.

(5.) The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, trans. Charles Arand et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 353.

(6.) Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: The Preservation of the Church, 1532-1546. trans. James L. Schaaf (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), notes the overriding theological character of Luther's view of the world when he writes that "justification by faith... was the consistent theme of his personality" (xii).

(7.) See "Exposition of the Seventeenth Chapter of the Gospel of John" in Select Works of Martin Luther, vol. II, trans. Henry Cole (London: T. Bensley, 1824), 20-24.

(8.) Martin Luther, "That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew," in Luther's Works 45, ed. and trans. Walter I. Brandt (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1962), 201.

(9.) Luther, "That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew," 229.

(10.) Luther, "On the Jews and Their Lies," in Luther's Works 47, ed. Franklin Sherman and trans. Martin H. Bertram (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), 172.

Winston B. Persaud asks where God is in a religiously charged, post-secular world. Religious diversity means real people and communities in our neighborhoods and workplaces who show their "differentness" in dress and worship. What in our Christian faith would prompt us toward openness, hospitality, and welcome toward these folks, and what might hinder us from doing so? One practical reason for leaving behind Luther's stereotypes and diatribes against people of other religions is that we could easily break the law of the land by following them. A primary theological reason for leaving them behind is that Luther's own explanation of the eighth commandment shows that to follow such stereotypes would be to violate God's word and God's will for the neighbor's good. Such stereotypes also obscure the One whom we confess, who stands with and came to die for all, including those against whom we are polemicizing. Our baptismal identity raises the ethical challenge of bearing witness to Jesus Christ who died for those w ho are persecuted and victimized in his name or who are relegated to the periphery of life and its bounties.