The obvious must sometimes be said: for inter-religious dialogue to be of any value those involved must know what they are talking about. And not just expertise. They must know what they have in common, what this “religion” thing is that they supposedly share.
In conversation with a long-time Muslim partner in dialogue the issue of gay marriage came up. He dismissed it as a topic for inter-religious dialogue: “Religious people all agree that it is absolute forbidden by God. There is nothing to talk about.”
Of course religious people don’t all agree on this or many issues, but more instructive is his understanding of “religious people.” From his perspective to be religious is to live in conformity to God’s commands revealed in the words and writings of the prophets. It is to listen and obey. And to his knowledge nowhere in that corpus is there a command for people of the same sex to marry. For him even lacking a specific prohibition the lack of a positive command would be telling.
Now there are Muslims that would disagree with him, but the reason for their disagreement is because they understand “religion” differently. My friend, and perhaps most Muslims, understand religion to be faithful obedience to a complex network of divine mandates ranging across the realms of ritual worship, ethics, law, family life, and politics. But there are so-called progressive Muslims who understand religion, Islam in particular, as the human application of certain universal ethical principles to ever changing situations. They see not a closely woven network of law, but instead immutable and universal principles manifest in different ways in different times.
This understanding of religion as immutable principles and changing implementations conforms well to a Western modernity in which an autonomous human subject interrogates religion, seeking answers about how to live and what to believe in an ever changing environment. In this view human society is continually ordered and re-ordered in fidelity to God’s revelation of the basic principles of human care for one another and the whole of creation. Beyond these principles God’s revelation is no more than a record of human fidelity to those principles; a lesson for future generations but not a mandate.
And here we have a immediate problem for dialogue. Is the “religion” in inter-religious dialogue a tightly woven network of beliefs and commands by which humans must live and to which they must conform their lives? Or is religion a set of immutable universal principles, recognizable by all humans, around which we must build our lives according to whatever insight, experience, and courage we can muster?
Is religious faith measured by the urgency, integrity, and consistency of our questions and our willingness to live by and with the answers we find? Or is it measured by our willingness to hear and obey God’s commands, letting them and them alone provide the context of our lives?
Inter-religious dialogue has typically been fashioned around one of these two approaches, or has manifest the tensions between them.
Or is there an alternative? Increasingly a perspective brought to inter-religious dialogue, although usually by laypersons rather than religious leaders, is that religion is a form of faithful listening attuned less to God’s command and more to God’s voice as a source of healing, life, comfort, emotional support, expanded consciousness of reality, inspiration, or direction. This understanding of religion is by no means absent in non-modern and modern religion. But neither, in my experience, is it the guiding understanding of religion in most inter-religious dialogue.
Indeed, to the extent that it makes central the religious activity called worship it is problematized by the ways in which worship is constrained in pre-modern understandings by God’s command, or in modern settings by the insistence that it conform to a process of asking questions, receiving answers, and taking action.
It may be that for inter-religious dialogue to break free from the constraints of modernity (and pre-modernity) its participants will need to both recognize those constraints, and learn ways to incorporate into their understanding of religion emerging forms of religious understanding
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