The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue

Catherine Cornille, Catherine Cornille

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118529942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Religions

This comprehensive volume brings together a distinguished editorial team, including some of the field's pioneers, to explore the aims, practice, and historical context of interfaith collaboration.

• Explores in full the background, history, objectives, and discourse between the leaders and practitioners of the world's major religions
• Examines relations between religions from around the world, moving well beyond the common focus on Christianity, to also cover over 12 major religions
• Features a wealth of case studies on contemporary interreligious dialogue
• Charts a long-term shift away from a competitive rivalry between belief systems, and a change in focus towards the more respectful, cooperative approach reflected in institutions such as the World Council of Churches
• Includes up-to-date commentary on the growing dialogue of recent years, written by some of the leading figures working in the field of interfaith discourse

PART I

Focal Topics

CHAPTER 1

The History of Inter-Religious Dialogue

Leonard Swidler

The world has always needed dialogue, but after the 1989 “Fall of the Wall,” and even more after 9/11, the world increasingly realizes that it needs dialogue. At the heart of dialogue is inter-religious dialogue, because religion is the most comprehensive of all the human “disciplines”: “an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly” (Swidler and Mojzes 2000). Until the slow emergence of inter-religious dialogue out of Modernity, out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment of the West, religion was also the most absolutist, exclusivist of all the disciplines. Thus, dialogue – fundamentally meaning “I can learn from you” – is a dagger pointed at the heart of absolutist religion/ideology. But, let’s start briefly at the beginning.

As long as there has been Homo sapiens sapiens (perhaps since 70,000 BCE.) there have been attempts – however meager – to explain “the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly”: religions. When small groups of humans gathered into large enough collectivities to form cities, each of these civilizations had at its heart a religion which both shaped and expressed that civilization. All of these ancient religions were “primary religions,” that is, were coterminous with the civilization or “state”; for instance, all members of the Israelite “nation,” and only they, were devotees of the Israelite religion.

That began to change drastically in the four ancient civilizations of Greece, Israel, India, China during the Axial Age (800–200 BCE). A shift occurred whereby some individuals began to identify no longer primarily with the collective, but with the personal conscience, to focus no longer primarily on the exterior, but on the interior. These religions increasingly tended to claim not just particularist but universal validity, that is, not just for, for instance, Athenians, but for all humans – which gave rise to religious absolutism. Still, the link between the state and religion remained strong, for as the state expanded the religion also tended to expand; and conquered peoples tended eventually to adopt the religion of the victors. For example, as the Christian, or later Muslim, armies were victorious, so too Christianity and Islam spread. Hence, the universalist claims of Axial and post-Axial religions led to at times peaceful, but also bellicose encounters among the various religions, with the latter by far dominating. There were occasional leading devotees of such religions who stand out as models of irenicism, like Ashoka the Great (304–232 BCE), the quasi-Buddhist Emperor of India, St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226 CE), Akbar the Great, Muslim Emperor of India (1542–1605 CE). Their peaceful impacts on inter-religious relations were, however, limited, geographically and in other ways, and inter-religious encounters during the subsequent age of European exploration and colonization were marked primarily by proselytization.

This slowly began to change, though at first not noticeably, with the rise of Modernity and the Enlightenment, which was characterized by freedom, reason, history, and later dialogue (Swidler 2011). The Enlightenment put forth a breakthrough thesis: at the heart of being human is freedom and rationality, and to that was added by the Late Enlightenment (German scholars write of die Spät Aufklärung) a sense of history and dynamism. Embedded in the clarion call written in 1776 in Philadelphia (Greek: Brotherly/Sisterly Love), “All men are created equal” was the soft whisper, “therefore dialogue.” It became a public voice at the inter-religious encounter of the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago.

The Christian Ecumenical Movement

Before directing our attention to the turning point of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, I would like to draw attention to a slightly later development that provided a solid underpinning for the expansion of inter-religious dialogue subsequent to the parliament. I am referring to the launching of the Christian Ecumenical Movement in 1910 in Edinburgh.

As a delegate to the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Bishop Charles H. Brent, a Missionary Episcopal Bishop in the Philippines, felt there was a need to discuss the questions of faith and ecclesiastical order deliberately excluded from the conference. Speaking from the floor, he announced his intention to found an organization for that purpose (eventually the Movement for Faith and Order) (Michael 1958: 21).

In the following fall, Bishop Brent addressed the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, telling the members about the Edinburgh Conference and urging them to take the lead in founding a Conference on Faith and Order. As a consequence, a committee was appointed. The response was extraordinarily favorable throughout the United States and other parts of the world. Even the response of the Vatican was very sympathetic, though indefinite. However, the plans were almost completely disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War (Sasse 1929: 5). Immediately after the war, in the spring of 1919, a deputation from the American Episcopal Church Commission left on a European trip in an attempt to contact the leaders of the Orthodox Churches and the Roman Catholic Church, and a date for the first World Conference of the Movement for Faith and Order was set for August 3, 1927, when 394 representatives from 108 Protestant and Orthodox Churches met in Lausanne, Switzerland (Tatlow 1954: 409–419).

Almost simultaneously a parallel effort was playing out. The genesis of the second large ecumenical organization, the Movement for Life and Work, was intimately bound up with the First World War, and the World Alliance of Churches for Promoting International Friendship, which was launched by the Protestant Churches early in 1914 as war was looming. The leader of both the Alliance and the Movement for Life and Work was the Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala, Nathan Søderblom. He maintained that a common organ of expression was necessary for the churches, and that its formation could not wait until they had achieved unity on matters of faith and order. This was shown by the helplessness of the churches during the crisis of the war. “We cannot afford to remain separated and in a state of unnecessary impotence caused by our separation, up to the time when we shall be truly united in faith and Church organization” (Søderblom 1923: 1). This Ecumenical Council would not encroach on the independence of the churches and would deal, not with matters of faith and order, but with social and international problems. As the planning committee of Life and Work expressed it in 1922, “Doctrine divides, but service unites” (Kalstroem: 540). The first international conference of Life and Work was held in Stockholm on August 19, 1925.

In the wake of these two huge ecumenical gatherings, the sentiment arose that they themselves needed an “ecumenical movement” to unify them. Plans were then eventually made to allow the second meetings of the two organizations to take place very near each other in time and place so that many delegates could attend both. This happened in the summer of 1937 in Oxford and Edinburgh. The two organizations each voted to merge, and joint committees were set up. The newly formed joint organization, named the World Council of Churches, was to have its first world conference in 1941, but, as in 1914, when the outbreak of war prevented the launch of the Movement for Faith and Order, so the formal coming into existence of the World Council of Churches was postponed by war; it had to wait until 1948, in Amsterdam.

Protestant leaders tried mightily to include the Catholic Church in their efforts toward Christian unity. However, the Pope’s own words in the early 1920s made it extremely clear that he had no intention of participating in ecumenical organizations. “Therefore, worthy brethren, it is clear why this Apostolic See never allows its own members to take part in the conferences of non-Catholic Christians. One may foster the reunion of Christians only insofar as one fosters the return of those standing outside to the one true Church from which they once unfortunately separated themselves” (Pius XI 1928: 58). Similar attitudes persisted in the Vatican for the next 40 years, repeatedly forbidding Catholic participation in dialogue (e.g., 1928 Mortalium animos; 1948 Monitum; 1949 Instructio; 1954 barring of Catholics at the Evanston World Council of Churches World Assembly). Clearly, the repeated Vatican condemnations were actually in reaction to the rising Catholic interest and participation in ecumenical dialogue – most notably through the Una Sancta Movement, starting in Germany after World War I (1914–18), expanding under Nazi oppression, and becoming a popular movement after World War II (1935–45) (see Swidler, 1966).

Why spend so much time reviewing the intra-Christian ecumenical movement when laying out the development of inter-religious dialogue? Inter-religious dialogue as it is now understood in each of its three primary modes – that is, reaching out to learn from other religions/ideologies more fully the meaning of life (Dialogue of the Head); joining with the Other to make the world a better place in which to live (Dialogue of the Hands); and an awe-filled embrace of the inner spirit and aesthetic expressions of the Other (Dialogue of the Heart) – grew out of the Enlightenment West, former Christendom. It is this magnetic lodestone that has been drawing the rest of the globe into its paradigm shift. It first drew splintered Christianity into its orbit, moving it to a search for greater unity in response to the ever-expanding intellectual challenge of the Enlightenment and its spun-off new scholarly disciplines: scientific history, sociology, anthropology, psychology. The growing Enlightenment moved on to begin to pull all the religions/ideologies of the world into its growing “Field of Force,” eventually ushering in by the latter part of the twentieth century the Age of Global Dialogue. Hence, it is vital to see some of the historical context whence this incredible world-changing global force derived.

The Move to Dialogue with Other Religions

As noted above, we can date the “public” launching of modern inter-religious dialogue to the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago (Barrows 1893). It was by far the most prominent gathering at the Columbian World Exhibition celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. What is stated about the parliament’s importance is accurate: “Today it is recognized as the occasion of the birth of formal inter-religious dialogue worldwide.”¹ The “trigger” of the positive explosion of inter-religious dialogue at the parliament was provided by the Indian Hindu Swami Vivekananda. He began his address: “ ‘Sisters and brothers of America!’ To these words he got a standing ovation from a crowd of seven thousand, which lasted for two minutes” (Bhuyan 2005: 5). Though Vivekananda was a devotee of a particular branch of Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta), he was not on a conversion trip to America. His aim clearly was dialogic in the modern sense: “ ‘I do not come,’ said Swamiji on one occasion in America, ‘to convert you to a new belief. I want you to keep your own belief; I want to make the Methodist a better Methodist; the Presbyterian a better Presbyterian; the Unitarian a better Unitarian. I want to teach you to live the truth, to reveal the light within your own soul’ ” (Vivekananda). A number of other well-known religious leaders also participated in the parliament, including Virchand Gandhi, a Jain scholar from India, Anagarika Dharmapala from Sri Lanka representing Theravada Buddhism, and D.T. Suzuki from Japan representing Zen Buddhism. They and many other religious teachers and leaders toured or taught in the West for years, spreading their teachings, gaining new followers in some instances, and promoting a new openness to other religions.

The fin de siècle parliament, massively reinforced by the subsequent inflow of the intra-Christian Ecumenical Movement at the beginning of the new century described earlier, opened the dam for the dialogue among the religions of the world. From this point forward only the outstanding events that most recognize as major markers in the development of inter-religious dialogue can be, albeit all too briefly, discussed. Since, as it happened, I personally “stumbled” into the “dialogue” in the middle of the twentieth century and was carried along with the expanding dialogic flood tide, I will now largely use my own direct experience as the “thread” with which to follow developments in inter-religious dialogue from the middle of the last century onward.

The first half of the twentieth century had seen a huge global Armageddon conflict in two stages referred to as the First and Second World Wars. Following the Second World War, with the beginning of the “Long Peace,” (Pinker 2011) most Protestant and Orthodox Churches were finally able to gather together in the World Council of Churches in 1948. However, as noted above, the great majority of Christians – Catholics – remained mired in isolation through the next decade and a half. Individual Catholic thinkers, and larger efforts like the German Una Sancta movement, nevertheless persisted against Vatican condemnations and silencings. Then suddenly, seemingly miraculously, the elderly Cardinal Angelo Roncalli was elected as a “safe interim” pope, (Saint) John XXIII. Shortly after his installation he called together the Cardinals in Rome and announced “I had a dream” (before Martin Luther King) in which he went around the Vatican throwing open the windows. He announced that he was calling a new Ecumenical Council (Vatican II) to follow the “signs of the times,” as he put it, to “bring the Catholic Church up to date (aggiornamento)” so it could engage in dialogue with the world.

Vatican Council II (1962–65) ushered in a revolution in the literal sense; it turned things around in many areas, including ...