Evangelization as Interreligious Dialogue

John C. Cavadini, Donald Wallenfang, John C. Cavadini, Donald Wallenfang

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532652110
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religioni comparate

What does Jesus have to do with Buddha? What does Muhammad have to do with Krishna? One of the most important tasks for theology in the twenty-first century is interreligious dialogue. Given the rapid process of globalization and the surge of information via the Internet, travel, and library networking today, interreligious dialogue has become a necessary element within Christian theology that no longer can be avoided. Evangelization as Interreligious Dialogue features eleven essays, plus an extensive introduction, that exercise a live conversation between religious others. Divided into four thematic sections--(1) Catholic approaches to interreligious dialogue, (2) dialogues between Judaism and Christianity, (3) dialogues between Islam and Christianity, and (4) dialogues between Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity--this volume conducts a sustained theological reflection on the current state of interreligious dialogue by signaling its hopeful promises and unrelenting challenges. The reader will be invited to encounter the religious other firsthand and put his or her most cherished theological assumptions to the test. This book aims to provoke an expansion of horizons for theological imagination as it exposes the basic dialectic of identity and difference as played out in the interaction between diverse religious beliefs, practices, and experiences.

Catholic Approaches to Interreligious Dialogue

chapter 1

The Saints as Locus of Interreligious Dialogue

—John C. Cavadini

In this essay I would like to make a proposal which is really a proposal for a proposal. An actual proposal would have to be more concrete than what I am offering here. Despite its very modest ambition, as not an actual proposal but a proposal for a proposal, I still would like to run it up the proverbial flagpole and see if anyone might, if not salute, at least consider shifting their eyes in that direction however momentarily. So here it goes: I would like to propose the lives of the saints as a potential locus for interreligious study and dialogue, maybe something like “hagiographical reasoning” study groups on the analogy of the “scriptural reasoning” study groups that are familiar to many. I realize that the word “saint” is contested, as would be much of the vocabulary associated with sanctity, holiness and virtue, but the same is true for “scripture” and that has not stopped scriptural reasoning groups from being formed and flourishing. In fact, I think a certain looseness of speech is not only allowable here but desirable. The word “saint,” for one thing, is a word of enormous potential appeal to the imagination. As an undergraduate I was attracted to a course whose title intrigued me: “The Buddha and the Saints.” What? I thought, other religions have saints? Even as a nineteen-year old I understood that the word “saints” in this context did not mean, someone who had made his or her way through the Catholic cursus honorum of servant of God, beatification and canonization with fully certified miracles deluxe along the way. But it was that word that made me want to take the course. A scheduling conflict precluded my actually enrolling but the title of the course, as you can see, has, like the sacraments of baptism and confirmation, mutatis mutandis, left a permanent mark on my imagination. I believe that anything with serious power to inspire and move the imagination also has the potential to unify in very concrete ways, even if the concept is, in a way, principally an appeal to the imagination rather than a term strictly defined according to a common agreement.

Nor do we need more than a rough and ready characterization of what a “saint” might be for the purposes of generating a proposal. Any saint worth their salt is not dependent upon definitions or precise theological distinctions to qualify him or her for admiration by people both learned and unlearned. The saints are not elitist. Far from it. Rather than restrict the term too technically, I would prefer to let it float as a kind of temptation to the imagination, and therefore a temptation to invest in the word a plenitude of meaning and a desire for a closer study.

But, lest this seem completely haphazard, towards the construction of a rough and ready understanding of what a “saint” might be in an eventual proposal, I will take a page from the process the Catholic Church uses in considering cases for beatification and canonization, namely, the category of heroic virtue. This is not necessarily a sufficient description of a saint, but it seems like a bare minimum that the saint be someone whose life is characterized by heroic virtue. Even if this is not a cross-cultural category, I believe the reality it refers to is cross-culturally visible and draws admiration and even devotion which can transcend cultural and religious boundaries. Beyond that, I would like to offer three ways of thematizing my proposal from a Catholic point of view. The first is Thomist, represented by Saint John Paul II; the second is Augustinian, represented by Pope Benedict XVI; and the third is existentialist, represented by Gabriel Marcel.

The Saint according to Saints Thomas Aquinas and John Paul II

First, then: in his great encyclical Veritatis splendor, Saint John Paul II takes up the topic of the natural moral law. In asking the question, “‘What must I do? How do I distinguish good from evil?’” he says that “the answer is only possible thanks to the splendor of truth which shines forth deep within the human spirit.”1 Even though, “as a result of that mysterious original sin, committed at the prompting of Satan, the one who is a ‘liar and the father of lies’ (John 8:44),” obedience to this resplendent truth is “not always easy,” and even though the very splendor of truth can itself be obscured because, under the dominion of sin, “the human capacity to know the truth is also darkened,” nevertheless it is a hallmark of Catholic teaching that human nature has not been totally corrupted by sin. Thus, “no darkness of error or of sin can totally take away from man the light of God the Creator.”2 This means that no human being is totally cut off from the access to truth which belongs to them simply as part of their humanity: “The Church knows that the issue of morality is one which deeply touches every person; it involves all people, even those who do not know Christ and his Gospel or God himself. She knows that it is precisely on the path of the moral life that the way of salvation is open to all.”3 John Paul cites Thomas Aquinas to further supplement his evocation of the natural law: “‘the light of natural reason whereby we discern good from evil, which is the function of the natural law, is nothing else but an imprint on us of the divine light,’” an imprint which is imparted by virtue of our creation.4

A hallmark of the natural law is, therefore, that it points to and evokes a certain solidarity among human beings as human beings and, at least formally, antecedent to any culture. I say “at least formally” because human existence is irreducibly cultural, and yet that does not mean that culture gives an exhaustive account of the human. In this regard, John Paul notes, “It must certainly be admitted that man always exists in a particular culture, but it must also be admitted that man is not exhaustively defined by that same culture.” If we believe that cultures can “progress” in any way—for example, from state-sponsored executions as a public spectacle to the abolition of the death penalty—then we are making a judgment on the basis of some measure that transcends a particular culture: “Moreover,” John Paul continues, “the very progress of cultures demonstrates that there is something in man which transcends those cultures. This ‘something’ is precisely human nature: this nature is itself the measure of culture and the condition ensuring that man does not become the prisoner of any of his cultures, but asserts his personal dign...