First published in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. Vol. 39, No. 1-2 (Winter-Spring, 2002).
Dr. Volf is the Director of the Center for Faith and Culture, Yale Divinity School
INTRODUCTION: SPEAKING IN A CHRISTIAN VOICE
I consider it an honor and a privilege to address this gathering of the
representatives from the three great families of "Abraham’s
children"–Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I am especially delighted
that we are gathering in the great city of Skopje. In recent years
Macedonia and its capital Skopje have suffered their share of violence.
Though the causes of violence are many, religious differences among
Macedonia’s various ethnic groups are certainly among them. Hence, it
is important to examine what each of our traditions says about living
with the other and to highlight resources that they provide for
overcoming enmities and living in peace.
Since I am a Christian and have been invited to deliver "the
Christian keynote address," I will speak in a Christian voice. Though I
seek to be faithful to the broad Christian tradition, I cannot speak
authoritatively for all Christians; nobody can, because
ecclesiastically Christians are not a monolithic group, and even within
a single church there is often disagreement and spirited debate. So, I
offer here my rendering of what the Christian tradition says about
“living with ‘the other.’” Before coming to the substance of my
presentation, however, let me briefly indicate what I mean by speaking
in a "Christian voice" in an interfaith context. A simple way to do so
is to discard two wrongheaded options and then suggest a better one.
Some suggest that all major world religions are basically more or less
the same. What is significant in each is common to them all. What makes
each differ from others is only a husk conditioned by various human
mentalities but holding an identical kernel. In An Interpretation of
Religion John Hick came close to this view in that, together with
Jalalu’l-Din Rumi, he argued that “the lamps are different, but the
Light is the same.”(1) To speak in a Christian voice from the
perspective of such an understanding of religion means to engage in
cracking the husk of difference that distinguishes the Christian faith
from other religions and displaying the kernel that unites it with
them. Whoever speaks authentically in a Christian voice will end up
agreeing with representatives of other religions, provided they do the
same.
While all major religions have much in common, including some
fundamental convictions, and while their adherents all possess the same
human dignity and therefore command the same respect, it is not clear
that all religions are basically the same. Most of their adherents
would disagree with the claim and feel that the one making it did not
sufficiently respect them in their own specificity but was, as it were,
looking through them in search of an artificially constructed essence
of their religion. My sense is that they would be correct. Major
religions represent distinctive, overarching interpretations of life,
with partly overlapping and partly competing metaphysical, historical,
and moral claims. To treat all religions as basically the same is to
insert them into a frame of meaning without sufficiently appreciating,
as Michael Barnes put it in Theology and the Dialogue of Religions,
“the irreducible mystery of otherness” of religions.(2) It is because
all major religions are not the same that it is worth engaging in
dialogues; such dialogues are exercises in mutual learning about
ourselves and others. Equally, it is because all major religions are
not the same that their adherents rightly argue with each other about
the merits and truth-content of their respective religions.
An alternative view agrees that major world religions represent
distinct overarching interpretations of life, but it suggests that what
is important in each tradition is precisely the places where they
differ. This view is rarely defended theoretically; it represents more
an unreflective way of relating to other religions, a stance toward
them. With such a stance, what matters the most, for instance, is not
that the children of Abraham all believe in one God but that Christians
believe that this one God is a Holy Trinity, whereas Jews and Muslims
staunchly object to this claim. To speak in a Christian voice is to
highlight what is specific to Christianity and to leave out what is
common as being comparatively unimportant.
Concentrating on differences seems to be a major mistake, so basic that
it includes a mistake about how to define something. As any
introduction to logic will make clear, you cannot define an entity by
noting only its specific difference; you must also include in your
definition its proximate genus. Human beings are rational animals;
“rational” is the specific difference, and “animal” is the proximate
genus. Applied to the world of religions, what is important about the
Christian convictions about God is not simply that God is the Holy
Trinity but also that the Father of Jesus Christ is the God who called
Abraham and delivered the Jews from slavery in Egypt, which is, from a
Christian perspective the God whom Muslims worship as Allah. Similarly,
what is important about the Christian sacred texts is not only that
they contain the “New Testament,” but also that they contain what
Christians call the “Old Testament,” which was originally a Jewish
sacred text, and that there is a significant overlap between Christian
and Muslim sacred texts. To think of one’s own or of another religion
simply in terms of its differences fr