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DIALOGUE AMONG CIVILIZATIONS "Peace Building Beyond Religious Bigotry"
DIALOGUE
AMONG CIVILIZATIONS
Peace Building Beyond Religious
Bigotry
(A Christian Perspective)
By: Hamid Henry
“The
greatest service of the European Reformation was to neutralize a
self-sufficient attitude by splitting western Christianity into two camps.
Modern European progress began when European developed an intellectual spirit
enabling them to learn from others without feeling inferior about it”.
Freeland Abbot
Introduction
In concluding his article, “The
clash of civilizations”, (1993) Samuel Huntington admits that “the west
requires to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and
philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the way in which
people in those civilization see their interest. It will require an effort to
identify elements of commonalty between Western and other civilizations. For
the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a
world of different civilizations each of which will have to learn to coexist
with the others”.(1)
As Abul Kalam suggests, “by rephrasing
Huntington one may conclude that civilizations are indeed dynamic; they rise
and fall; they divide and merge; they disappear and stay buried in the sands of
time, but the light of humanity is eternal and we all must work to keep it
illumined”.(2) And hence dialogue between civilizations.
Amit Gupta in his critique to
Huntington theory of the clash of civilizations argues that the Islamic
fundamentalism is seen generally, and certainly by Huntington, as being the most
potent civilizational force and one that is anti-Western in its orientation.(3).
There are, however, fundamentalists groups not only in Islam but in other sects
too. The Hindus in India, and the Buddhists in Sri Lanka are not without
fanatics. The Christians have theirs too. The intensity of the groups, however,
vary from sect to sect.(4)
In the backdrop of Gupta’s stance,
this paper attempts to present a Christian perspective with regard to dialogue
between Christianity and Islam as revealed faiths.
A
Theology of Dialogue
It is Christology, not ‘comparative
religion’ that is the basis of dialogue with other faiths. The primary interest
of the church is to be with Christ in his continuing work among men of all
faiths and ideologies. Christians have an obligation to listen and learn as
well as to speak and teach. In dialogue, others may help us to understand our
own Christian faith better, even as our listening can be a form of proclamation
in the quest for truth.
The
early Church seriously grappled with issues raised by its encounters with the
religions, philosophies and cultures of the Greco-Roman world. Thus, dialogue
became a form of evangelism. Moreover, dialogue is one of the crucial areas of
relationship between Christians and men of other faiths today where sustained
theological reflection must continue not in the isolation of academic
discussions, but in the midst of our life together in the community where all
are pilgrims on the high roads of modern life.
There
are at least three theological reasons why dialogue is and ought to be a
continuing Christian concern.
First,
God in Jesus Christ has himself entered into relationship with men of all
faiths and all ages, offering the good news of salvation. The incarnation is
God’s dialogue with men. To be in dialogue is, therefore, to be a part of God’s
continuing work among us and our fellow men.
Second,
the offer of a true community inherent on the gospel, through forgiveness,
reconciliation and a new creation, and of which the Church is a sign and
symbol, inevitably leads to dialogue. The freedom and love with Christ offers
constrains to be in fellowship with strangers so that all may become fellow
citizens of the household of God.
Third,
there is a promise of Jesus Christ that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all
truth. Since, truth, in the biblical understanding, is not prepositional but
relational, and is to be sought not in the isolation of lonely meditation, but
in the living personal confrontations between God and man, and men and men,
dialogue become one of the means of the quest for truth. And because Christians
cannot claim to have a monopoly of truth, we need to meet men of other faiths
and ideologies as part of our trust in and obedience to the promise of Christ.(5)
The
Spirituality of Dialogue
The
World Day of Prayer for Peace, held in Assisi in 1986, was a basic landmark in
the field of inter-faith dialogue. For the first time in history, a large
number of religious leaders gathered together in order to pray and witness to
the transcendental nature of peace. Those who took part in the experience are
unanimous in affirming its extraordinary nature. In the view of the Dalai Lama,
the meeting at Assisi had extremely beneficent results, since ‘it symbolized
the solidarity and commitment to peace shown by all those took part in it’.
Speaking of the event, Pope John Paul II stated that the unanimity of feeling
shown there produced a vibration of ‘the deepest strings of the human spirit’.
Christians from the various churches and ecclesial communities stood side by
side with one another and with representatives of other religious traditions,
as companions on the common journey, in a spirit of prayer, fasting, and
pilgrimage.
The
paradigm of Assisi opened up a new horizon of dialogue for the religions. The importance
and novelty of what happened at Assisi was expressed in significant ways both
by the participants and by the observers and analysts. It did in fact represent
a new start and a historical initiative of major importance. Going beyond the
intentions of those who took part and breaking out of their empirical envelope,
the Assisi event proved to be a ‘gesture without precedent’; an extraordinary
and unique happening that carried an explosive symbolic charge within itself.
The invitation issued by the pope to the leaders of other churches and of the
various religious traditions implied an ‘act’, a ‘gesture’, that, moving beyond
words, would mark a change of outlook on ecumenical relations and on those with
the other world religions.
The
initiative taken at Assisi encouraged not only a creative reception of Vatican
II but also the recognition of the value of religions to the world, and it
acted as an effective stimulus to reflection on the subject in inter-faith
dialogue. In a way not seen before, men
and women of different religious traditions came together to witness before the
world to the ‘transcendent quality of peace’. The very fact the event was
conveyed already showed a unique symbolic meaning, a recognition and acceptance
of the legitimacy of other religious traditions in God’s saving plan: ‘a
recognition of these religions and of prayer in particular, a recognition that
the religions and prayer not only have a social function but are effective with
God. Not confined to a single act, the Assisi experience had an ‘explosive
spiritual power’, from which ‘new peace energies’ sprang, with unprecedented
repercussions that showed the way forward into new ways of dialogue.(6)
Dialogue
for Peace
One of the basic contributions made by
the gathering at Assisi was to indicate the importance of the different
religious traditions acting in common to defend and promote human and spiritual
values. What was most evident was the absolute need to act for the sake of
peace. The challenge of peace presents the religions with the imperative of
working for the survival of the human race and for a better quality of life for
all. The struggle to bring about peace is a challenge facing not just small
groups of specialists or strategists; it is a ‘universal responsibility’.
Religions can here make one of their special contributions. Beyond their
differences, this witness for peace is shown to be a ‘common basis’ of
responsibility for solving the most dramatic challenge of our age – ‘true peace
or catastrophic war’.(7)
Dialogue with Islam
Even in the age of Interfaith
Dialogue, the dialogue with Islam remains particularly difficult. This is so
not only because of the contradictions in the area of theology or because of
the rival missionary ambitions. The cause is also, from the historical point of
view, the cultural distance engendered by two religious ideologies that both
have the ambition of fashioning in a totalitarian way the lives of individuals,
families and society.
The real-life experience shows that
the equality of the partners is known to be one of the conditions of any true
dialogue. Now, it is a fact that Muslims often have the feeling that this
preliminary condition does not exist. This is not only due to a (certain)
complex perhaps stemming from a disparity of centuries in comparison to a
modernity to which Christianity has been able to adapt without repudiating
itself. This is the so because the dialogue seems to be lop-sided from the
outset.
Judging by a history of conflict of
over 13 centuries, it is possible to talk about a mimetic rivalry. The
entire question would then be to know if indeed the time has not come to
convert this rivalry into mutual emulation.
Commonalities and Rivalry
If Christianity and Islam are compared
to the other world religions, it is possible to say that they both have the
same eschatological ambition: they both have a vision of the definite
accomplishments. For Christians, Christ is God’s Definite ‘Yes’ to humankind,
accomplishing all the prophecies and all the promises of the Old Covenant.
Islam has the same pretence of completing all previous religions. Even if the Qur’an
attributes a privileged place to Jesus as a prophet, Muhammad is the prophet
who is ‘the seal of prophecy,’ the prophet of the Ultimate, who confirms and
completes the previous prophesies of Abraham, of Moses and of Jesus.
It must be added that the two
religions compete in their claim of universality. Unlike Judaism and many other
religions that are tied to a land, to an ethnical group and to a particular
culture, Christianity and Islam are missionary from the outset. And indeed,
albeit their places of birth, they have crossed all the ethnical, cultural and
political borders and spread across all the continents. Islam, with more than one
billion followers, has gone beyond the Arab world. African Islam, and above all
Asiatic Islam, has manifested growing vitality. The two religions justify their
missionary zeal and their desire for conquest insofar as they both claim to be
sole bearers of a definitive salvation for humankind.
Finally, both religions pretend to
have absolute truth concerning God, humankind and the world, since they are
based on a Scripture that is the word of God. This is where one needs to search
for the profound source of the conflicting relations between Christianity and
Islam of their spontaneous intolerance toward other religions. For centuries,
Muslims, like Christians, created dogmas and laws founded on revelation as an
absolute truth without any reference to history. It is not surprising then if,
on the basis of this absolute truth, each community elaborated theological and
legislative structures that have turned into systems that exclude each other.
Each religion claims to have living tradition founded on the undisputed
postulate that the texts laid down in the official corpus are the faithful
reproductions of initial enunciations of the Revelation. Thus, from the very
outset, the Christian refused to recognize Islam’s first dogma, i.e., The Qur’an,
as being the Word of God revealed to humankind through Muhammad (PBUH), the
messenger of God.
And conversely, Muslims have not
ceased, on the basis of the same Qur’an, to accuse Christians and Jews
of falsifying the Scriptures.
The Burden of History
The old historical dispute opposing
Islam and Christianity has structural and doctrinal causes that are tied to
identical pretenses. But it is not only a question of theological confrontation
of two contending religions. This is a rivalry between two empires and two
civilizations. Just as Christianity, at its origin, gave birth to a
Christendom, with confusion about the political and religious domains, the
success of the preaching of Muhammad (PBHU), the Prophet, very quickly led to
the construction of a new empire that conquered the Mediterranean region
between the 8th and the 12th centuries, with capitals as
prestigious as Damascus, Baghdad and Cordoba. And regardless of the difference
between historical situations, which no longer coincide with the Arabic Muslim
civilization, the confrontation of the two religions today still sustains the
rivalry opposing two models of civilization, the world of Islam on the one
hand, on the other, the West. And inside each religion, the faithful project on
others their collective imagination fed by stereotyped representations, by
prejudices that are not criticized, by frustrations and ancestral fears. The
horrible war in the Balkans revived the ancient fear of a Christendom that,
until the victory of Lepanto, had been living under the threat of Islam with
the mentality of a besieged city. And because of the periodic resurgence of the
perverse ideology of Islamism, certain people are tempted to think, especially
since the collapse of the Soviet empire, that the border between the free world
and a totalitarian world is the border between the West and world of Islam.
Conversely, the collective imagination
of the Muslim masses often continues to identify Christianity with a western
imperialist and materialist model. A simplifying discourse would be inclined to
make us believe that Christianity is the dominating religion of rich countries
of the first world, while Islam would be the religion par excellence of
oppressed populations in the third world. We know that the reality is much more
complex, especially when the Gulf States and the economic success of certain
Muslim countries in the South-East Asia are evoked. But at the same time, it
remains true that Christianity must question itself about its direct or
indirect responsibility in the construction of a world order the sign of market
laws that confine millions of men and women in a network of economic
constraints established by the West.
It is not possible to evoke the
presence of Christian minorities in the region of Islam without questioning
about their faithfulness to the permanent mission of the church in the world.
Of course, as lay-people, priests, men and women religious, notwithstanding
their limited numbers and resources, they have the conviction and the pride of
ensuring the presence of the universal church. Who would doubt, for example,
that the little Church in Algeria is the sacrament of the universal church? And
the same thing could be said of the churches in Pakistan and in Indonesia,
despite the reduction of their specifically religious space. But how can one
not be wearied by the inflation of the discourse on the respect for others and
the benefits of dialogue while Christians’ rights to freedom of worship and
freedom of expression are not respected and while their disinterested service
of the poor is suspected of hiding missionary intentions?
Forms of Dialogue
However, we still need to evoke the
diverse forms that the dialogue between Christians and Muslims may take
on.
The Dialogue of Life
In many places throughout the world
official meetings assemble Christians and Muslims, meetings at which experts
discuss, with assurance, about their points of divergence and convergence.
These discussions often leave us unsatisfied because nothing, in fact, replaces
the dialogue of life on the day-to-day basis, where men and women of
different beliefs, with a spirit of openness and conviviality, in the street,
at work, at school or in universities, try to share their pain and their joy
and discover their solidarity in situations of social conflicts, unemployment,
poverty, illness and old age. One notices in living with peoples that the words
don’t have the same meanings because they are not carried by the same spiritual
experience. In order that the words may express the same things, it is
necessary to live together, to share an experience, the experience of human
life with birth, living, suffering, love and death. Giving words the weight of
flesh, that’s dialogue.’
Dialogue in Action
It is encouraging to see that, in many
places throughout the world, there is true collaboration and even a kind of
complicity between Muslim and Christian minorities trying to go beyond their
historical quarrel and working together for the promotion of justice and
international peace. The quest for justice and peace necessarily implies
respecting human rights, including the right of religious liberty, the
promotion of women; respecting the rights of children exploited as laborers;
protecting natural resources; fighting against all forms of discrimination against
migrant workers. In the face of the repeated violations of human rights, the
children of Abraham have a historical vocation that consists in reminding the
world that the radical foundation of human rights is not only the dignity of
each human being but the creation of man in the image of God, the common
heritage of the monotheistic religions. At the same time, and drawing on our
spiritual resources, we share the responsibility for recalling that the
construction of a more humane and more democratic society cannot be based only
on the strict exercise of justice in the name of human rights. Given the rise
of diverse forms of intolerance, nationalism, racism and fanaticism, it is
necessary to call for recourse to forgiveness, to welcoming of strangers, as
well as to the Muslim duty of hospitality and to the Christian spirit of the
Beatitudes.
Dialogue of Prayer
It does happen that Christians and
Muslims meet to share their spiritual treasures and exchange on their own ways
of attaining inner silence and the experience of the living God. We have said
that Muslims and Christians diverge on fundamental points in what they believe.
But on the spiritual level, they can discover secret points on convergence. The
exchange can lead to the silent dialogue of prayer in which each person,
faithful to his own religious tradition, feels that he is mysteriously in
communion with the others. This is not common prayer, but those present are
assembled in prayer to the God they believe in. In line with this, the encounter
of Assisi in October 1986 was the first historical expression of what we could
call planetary ecumenism. After the event in Assisi, the pope did not
hesitate to declare: ‘All authentic prayer finds itself under the influence of
the Holy Spirit.’ In face of the modern religious indifference and the growing
seduction of the great eastern religions, Christians and Muslims have a common
spiritual vocation to adore a personal God.
Dialogue on the Doctrinal Level
This is obviously the most difficult
dialogue and often the most disappointing. Here we often end up by noting our
disagreement since we understand that certain divergences cannot be negotiated.
But we do not have the right to abandon this form of dialogue. Such a dialogue
can help us to discern more clearly the originality of the message we convey
and stimulate us in the quest of God beyond God, i.e. beyond our insufficient
representations in which we imprison ourselves. Pierre Claverie, in his
article, ‘Humanite plurielle’, published in Le Monde, says: ‘I am
a believer, I believe that there is a God, but, I don’t pretend to possess that
God, neither by Jesus who revealed him to me, nor by the dogmas of my faith.
One cannot possess God.’ All true dialogue leads us to a state beyond dialogue,
that is, to a mysterious mutual fecundity of the systems of beliefs that are
confronting one another. This is the moment to say that the long historical
rivalry between Christianity and Islam ought to transmute itself into
reciprocal emulation.(8)
Conclusion
In reality there are problems about
situations being faced by the adherents of two great religions Islam and
Christianity. For example, in the Philippines it is the political oppression of
the Muslims by the Christians, whereas elsewhere it is the social oppression of
Christians by the Muslims. Each community has his own symbolic meaning for
words because of the situation at home.
It is often argued that a dialogue
merely at an academic level - that often takes place at the upper strata of the
society and lacks a liberative dimension - may dull the spirit and hamper
action on the part of people struggling for a change in their dehumanized
situations. What we precisely
need is an issue and action-oriented
living dialogue between Christian Muslim masses at the grassroots level for
which a radical form of spirituality and dialogue is inevitable.
The difficulties, resistance, and barriers raised make the progress of inter-faith dialogue [‘The Dialogue of Civilizations’] more problematical, but they cannot prevent its affirmation in history. This is one of the most important and essential features of our age. Dialogue does not suffocate religious convictions but reveals new and unexpected dimensions of the mystery of God. As Pope John Paul II stated, the spirit of Assisi cannot be extinguished but has to spread throughout the world, everywhere encouraging new witnesses to peace and dialogue. At this time of hardening of ethnic and religious conflicts the world has most need of peace and dialogue, of a more authentic relationship with the Absolute, one that brings more life and humanity to all. The spirit of Assisi is a providential gift to our time and must act as an inspiration for greater daring along the route of dialogue, so that the men and women of this world, whatever race or creed they belong to, can discover themselves to be children of God and brothers and sisters of one another.(9)
__________________
Footnotes
1.
Quoted from “The Clash of Civilizations: Asian Responses”, Rashid, Salim,
(Ed.), Oxford University Press, Dhaka, 1997. P. 26.
2.
Kalam. Abul, “Huntington and the World
Order: Systematic Concern or Hegemonic Vision?” in “The Clash of
Civilizations: Asian Responses”, p. 60
3.
Gupta, Amit, “Are We Really Seeing the
Clash of Civilization?” in “The Clash of Civilization: Asian Responses “,
p. 66.
4.
Manuel, Lawrence, “Looking at the West in a
Complex World”, Focus Vol 22 No.2, 2002, Pastoral Institute, Multan, Pakistan,
p.139.
5.
Samartha,
S.J., “Dialogue as a Continuing Christian Concern” in “MISSION
TRENDS”, Ed. Gerald H. Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky, CSP, Paulist Press
– NY and B Eerdmans Publishing Co. Grand Rapids, October, 1978, pp. 247-248,
257 - 258.
6.
Faustino Teixeira, “The Paradigm of
Assisi”, in, ‘CONCILIUM’, 2001/3, pp. 111-112.
7.
Ibid, “The Paradigm of Assisi”, pp.
115,117
8.
For
a fuller exposition of these insights see Geffre, Claude, “The Theological Foundations of Dialogue”, Focus Vol 22 No.1 of
2002, Pastoral Institute, Multan, Pakistan, pp.20-21, 30-33, 37-40.
9.
Ibid, “The Paradigm of Assisi”, pp. 118.
_____________
This paper was presented
in the seminar “Building Spirituality & Culture of Peace Beyond
Globalization” organized by Christian Conference of Asia, Hong Kong, held at Colombo, Sri Lanka,
August 13-16, 2003.
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Mass and Church
IF THERE’S NO MASS, THERE’S
NO CHURCH
Bill
Huebsch rightly observes that “if there’s no mass, there’s no church”. (“Vatican
II in Plain English”, Thomas More, Allen, Texas, 1997) Indeed, for most,
the main way of being Catholic is attending Mass. But it’s also a little deeper
than that. Most Catholics also believe that what happens at Mass cannot and
does not happen anywhere else in the world or the universe.
Catholics
believe that a priest have the power to change the bread and wine into the
actual Body and Blood of Christ. This is how they identify themselves as
Catholics. This belief runs very deep in the Catholic mind, giving the Mass a
very high place in Catholic thinking as the most important human activity. In
the famous movie “Romero”, this is made vividly clear.
It’s
a movie about the life and death of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador who was killed for his
defense of the poor. The filmmaker shows a moment in Romero’s life where
he was confronted by the power of the national army as he stood in a peasant
village, which he’d come to defend.
He
was shirtless and vulnerable as he stood there. Their weapons were drawn and
aimed at him. Their anger was intense. He appeared to be utterly powerless. But
his response was the Catholic response. “We will now begin the Mass,” he said,
standing there in the street, naked, beaten, and poor. “In the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit . . .” he began as he traced on
his body the Sign of the Cross.
The
camera faded back to show peasants knelling in the dust of the roadway, signing
themselves and enacting that most powerful of human activities: the Mass. The
centrality of the Mass was driven home even more powerfully at the end of the
film as Oscar Romero was murdered by an assassin, even as he raised the host
during the consecration of the Mass.
Bill
adds that after Vatican II, the Liturgy of the Word became a more prominent
part of the Mass, offering Catholics more access to Scripture and preaching
than before. But in popular understanding, the consecration and communion
remain the center-point of the celebration. The old Baltimore Catechism taught that we were obliged to be present only
for the three principal parts of the Mass; the offertory, the consecration, and
the priest’s communion. Some of that
belief still remains. We mess with other parts of the Mass, but we don’t mess
with the consecration of the bread and wine.
Bill
argues that we may replace priests when we need to for preaching, teaching,
visiting the sick, handling the money, baptism, funeral, and even for the
Liturgy of the Word in priest-less parishes but never for the mass. Because if
there’s no priest, there’s no Mass.
The
Mass is the Church for many Catholics. If we take away all the other activities
and leave only the Mass, we’d still have the Church. But if we take away the
Mass, and leave everything else or even increase it, there’d be no Church left.
It’s really that central to Catholic self-identity.
________
Wednesday, December 27, 2023
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