There also remained this nagging question: what do I really know about Islam? The furor, the fear, the outright hostility—what was behind this? Had I been a dupe? (One emailer compared my reconciling words to the acts of Neville Chamberlain.) Moreover, why had I, as a faculty member in a university with explicit Christian commitments, never taken time to have any substantive conversations with Muslims, especially when a mosque sits just about a mile north of our campus? I realized my own failing to get to know my neighbors. And thus some new experiences began to unfold.
Chapter 2: To Seek to Understand Rather Than to Be Understood
Eight or nine years ago, I was frustrated with some new policy at our university, and I turned to one of my colleagues after a faculty meeting and said, "That really makes me mad." He looked at me, laughed, and replied, "You're always mad." It was a stinging, revelatory moment for me. Something of an addiction to the rush of the state of being offended had developed.
About that time in my life I rediscovered the beautiful prayer traditionally attributed to Francis of Assisi:
Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.1
"Double Vision"
To seek to understand rather than first to be understood; rather than indulging my anger and the desire to be offended, I first listen well to the other. What if we were to take this approach as a theological method? That is, rather than a posture of fear, condemnation, or resentment, what would it mean to employ what Alan Jacobs calls a "hermeneutic of love"?2 What would it mean to seek to read texts and engage in theological conversation with no other goal than to love God and neighbor and enemy? Miroslav Volf's excellent book Exclusion and Embrace employs different terminology but a similar approach, which he calls "double vision." He does not mean by this "fuzzy vision." Instead, he calls us to look at things from another perspective, namely, the perspective of our enemies. In doing so, we may be able to see things we could not possibly see otherwise:
We enlarge our thinking by letting the voices and perspectives of others, especially those with whom we may be in conflict, resonate within ourselves, by allowing them to help us see them, as well as ourselves, from their perspective, and if needed, readjust our perspectives as we take into account their perspectives. Nothing can guarantee in advance that the perspectives will ultimately merge and agreement be reached. We may find that we must reject the perspective of the other.3
But such a practice may also allow us, he notes, to bring our different conceptions of justice alongside one another so that our different understandings enrich one another and perhaps even issue forth in unexpected forms of agreement.
This is no call to some intellectually lazy relativism. On the one hand, it is important for us to reject the modernist conceit that it is possible to "see things as they really are," to see, as it were, with God's eyes. But to reject such an intellectual arrogance—that we can simply see things with timeless, universal eyes—is not the same thing as saying that one opinion is as good as any other.4 But it is a call to intellectual humility. We are all finite human beings, belabored not only with our finitude but also with prejudices and presuppositions and our own experiences. That is, we all see things from our own perspective. All our knowing is "socially located." We see things as we see them, and at our best, we seek to describe the world as we see it and understand it, fairly and without self-promoting agendas, but all the while acknowledging that our seeing and knowing are inescapably mediated through our time, place, experience, and often, ill motives.5
Is there any theological ground for the practice of double vision, of seeking first to understand rather than to be understood? One obvious ground is found at the foot of the cross of Jesus. That is, whatever we learn or think we know must be mediated through what we first learn through a crucified Messiah. In my own experience, however, a theology of the cross is what very often drives the rhetoric of certainty and being offended. Someone might object, for example: "Does not Jesus's crucifixion presuppose that God is holy, that humankind is unholy, that God is a God of absolute righteousness who can hold no parley with unrighteousness? Playing intellectual games like double vision brings us nigh unto making a mockery of a crucified Lord, a Lord who died because of the wickedness and injustice of the unrighteous. Our task is not to try to understand the perspective of the wicked. Our task is to call them to repentance, to call them to embrace what we know is good and right."
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