Models of interreligious dialogue, by Valson Thampu*, 8 June 2005

I

Introductory

Dialogue is an engagement with otherness. ‘The other' activates the ambivalence inherent in human nature: the contrary pulls to embrace and to exclude. We domesticate ourselves in the parts and, at the same time, feel claustrophobic in them. Latching on to the parts, we long nostalgically for the whole, which is our home. In the zeal for our religions, we lose sight of religion. In an obvious sense, interfaith dialogue is motivated by the need to transcend conflictual and competitive religiosity. In a deeper sense, however, it is inspired by the intuition of, and longing for, a deeper spirituality.

We need to be nurtured by our respective religions. But we also need to intuit the unity that underlies this religious diversity. Religions are like the different languages we speak. Spirituality is the air that brings the words we speak to each other. Religions are the raw material for dialogue, but spirituality is its necessary medium. Inter-religious dialogue, in other words, needs to be a spiritual enterprise, if it is to be more than a mere showcasing of religious wares. Inter-religious dialogue can, and must, eventuate into a shared spiritual pilgrimage. The courage to seek the truth and the willingness, if need be, to be changed by it, are the substratum alike of dialogue and pilgrimage.

"Otherness" challenges our spiritual orientation. Otherness is a function of our attitude to differences. Differences, in themselves, need not precipitate alienation. In respect of ‘differences' we stand at the crossroads from where we can turn either to alienation or to a higher harmony. As regards religions, alas, we have taken the road to alienation and, consequently, infected the inter-religious space with negativity and hostility. Alienation is what we import into differences and diversities. The liberating truth is that we can take a different route. Religion is meant to help us to avoid the path of alienation and to choose the way of good will. Instead, we have improvised religiosities of alienation and negativity. The physician is sick and stands in need of healing. Hospitality, not mutual hostility, is the mark of religious wholeness. Inter-faith dialogue, hence, needs also to be envisaged as a therapeutic enterprise vis-à-vis religions. Healing calls for a diagnosis, which entails the humility to know and accept the truth. There is a need, hence, to reckon that:

1. God, not religion, is the absolute. Whenever religion is absolutized, God is trivialized and caricatured in practice, if not in profession.
2. Religion is a tool, not the goal. The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. A religiosity that inhibits our love for the neighbour or blinds us to her needs, worth and dignity, is a travesty of true religion.
3. Religions together constitute the rainbow of our shared spiritual destiny. From an integrative perspective, as opposed to a hierarchical one, notions of superiority or inferiority are inadmissible in responding to religions.
4. Between the spiritual core of a religion and its practice by its adherents there is, at all points in time, a tension. When a religion is in decline, its religiosity contradicts its spiritual core. This decay is a serious threat to inter-religious harmony. Inter-religious dialogue must be, hence, motivated by a deep commitment to promoting each other's spiritual wholeness in loving humility and openness. Genuine inter-religious encounters must sharpen and deepen the spirituality of the participants.
5. The more fanatic and dogmatic one gets about a religion, the greater the disservice one does to it. Aggressive religious fundamentalism and communalism are a scandal to the religion for the sake of which, presumably, they are improvised. It is not by despising or deriding the neighbour's religion that one proves one's religious fervour, but by embodying the spiritual essence of one's religion in fresh vitality and proactive relevance. As is well said, "God wants spiritual fruits, not religious nuts."
6. Inter-religious dialogues that bypass the challenge of religious reform amount, at best, to debates of belabourd courtesy. Dialogue distinguishes itself from debate by a willingness to challenge and change oneself; whereas debate is marked by an alertness to defend one's own entrenched position and an eagerness to change the other. From the perspective of debate ‘changing oneself' is soured by a sense of defeat, whereas changing the other smacks of triumph.

A sense of realism and a capacity for self-criticism are, hence, basic to the discipline of dialogue. That realism must engage, in the first place, the fact that all of us are religiously ‘conditioned'. We are not as free as we assume ourselves to be. The pathos of it is that we are not, often, free to do justice to what is noble and valuable in our own religions. From this stem the irony and paradox of inter-religious dialogue. To dialogue in the name of our religions, we need to be ‘formed' within our respective religious traditions. Yet, to be formed thus is to be religiously conditioned and to forfeit the freedom and flexibility to dialogue. The very eligibility requirement, so to speak, for inter-religious dialogue disqualifies us for it! To practice inter-religious dialogue without grappling with this inherent paradox is to situate dialogue in the zone of make-believe.

Here, for the sake of clarity, let us be religion-specific. The Bible presents the life and works of Jesus as a dialogue with the human predicament. St. John states that the matrix for that dialogue is the all-inclusive and all-embracing love of God (St. John 3: 16). Jesus is an embodiment of God's love for the whole world, not a partisan gift to a people. In theory, there is no problem in accepting God's love, which is universal. The problem is in packaging and apportioning this love. Religions are, in themselves, vehicles too small to contain the whole of God's love, in respect of which religions are like vessels held out to the rain. Each one holds something of the rain, but not the whole of it. All the religious vessels of the world together cannot contain the fullness of the rain of God's love. Yet, this liberating and subversive truth is neither visible nor acceptable to the perspective of the religious establishment. This explains why the dialogic journey of Jesus begins from outside the framework of organized religion. The familiar trappings and stereotypes of religion are conspicuously absent from the circumstances of his birth. Born in a cattle-shed, kept in a manger among animals, visited thereafter by the Shepherds of Bethlehem and the gentile Magi -both, hardly religious characters- Jesus begins his spiritual enterprise as a religious ‘outsider'. Only the outsider, it seems, is free to be radical; whereas the insiders are obliged to parrot and defend the truth of the establishment. The ‘insider' can be faithful to a religious tradition; whereas it may take an ‘outsider' to fulfill it, provided the ‘outsider' in question is willing to forego the luxury of remaining a ‘stranger'. The prophet, according to Jesus, is the ‘outsider' within: an unwelcome presence among his own people. Inter-religious dialogue cannot move towards a breakthrough as long as it lacks the prophetic cutting edge. Inter-religious dialogues cast in the mould of parleys between the spokespersons of the status quo cannot change the realities on the ground. There is a need, hence, to radicalize dialogue in this context.

What does it mean, then, to ‘radicalize' inter-religious dialogue? This word today carries a burden of ascribed negative associations. To many people it suggests, irrespective of its etymology, overtones of anarchy and violence. But, to radicalize is to go to the root causes, which is necessary to see issues and processes in their totality. Reality is like the iceberg; nine-tenth of it remains submerged. To radicalize inter-religious dialogue is to situate it within the discipline of the dialogue of life itself. Life is, perforce, a dialogue with God. Listening, more than talking, is the quintessence of the dialogue of life. Of course, it is possible to live as though God does not exist; or that, even if he exists, he does not have to be listened to. But it is by dialoguing God that we develop the discipline of dialogue at all. Before we can listen to each other as free persons, we need to listen to God. When we are in dialogue with God we wake up to the need to dialogue -to listen to, interrogate and understand- our own self. This sets us free to dialogue our brothers which, in the religious context, becomes intra-religious dialogue. Dialoguing the self and the brother, consequent to dialoguing with God, accredits us to dialogue our neighbours, which is inter-religious dialogue. Assuming that those who are averse to the discipline and culture of dialogue in all other domains of life can do justice to the spiritual scope of inter-religious dialogues is a piece of pleasant fiction. Dialoguing God (prayer), oneself (self-criticism in humility), and one's religious community (intra-religious dialogue) constitute the stepping-stones to the sanctuary of inter-faith dialogue.  

II

Models of Dialogue

Dialogue, as stated at the outset, is an engagement with otherness. ‘Otherness' can morph itself into two generic manifestations: stranger and neighbour. The decisive factor here is not ‘the other'. It is, instead, our spiritual orientation. An orientation of ‘hostility' in us makes ‘the other' seem a stranger. With minimum touches, the stranger can be made to resemble an enemy. An outlook of hospitality transforms ‘the other,' first, into a neighbour and, then, into a brother or sister. Consequently, there are two broad categories of dialogue: dialogue of hospitality and dialogue of hostility. A heated altercation is also a dialogue: a dialogue of hostility. It turns neighbours into strangers and enemies. The ‘doctrine of the other cheek' denotes a wordless dialogue of hospitality, which has the power to liberate people from enmity and lead them to the broad places of neighbourliness and brotherhood. For want of adequate alertness to these two orientations, inter-faith dialogues oscillate at times between hospitality and hostility, especially when the dialogue ventures into uncharted territories.

In the light of the above, we may recognize two models of dialogue.

(a) Dialogue of strangers: Every instance of human intercourse devoid of love belongs to this model. Suffice it is to examine two variations of this model. (a) The Market Model of Inter-faith Dialogue. Advertisement is the insignia of the market. In this model of inter-religious dialogue, the prime motivation is to showcase one's religious wares. This eagerness makes a mockery of the process of dialogue and degrades it into a one-way traffic, as in the case of advertisement. In principle, advertisements also belong to the domain of dialogue because effective advertising calls for an alert understanding of popular tastes and dispositions. Advertisement is dissected or fragmented dialogue, so to speak. It involves listening and speaking, but listening and speaking are isolated from each other; whereas true dialogue integrates them. Customers are heard, but not listened to. The practice of inter-religious dialogue, devoid of the humility to listen with open minds to each other as a continuous and evolving process, belongs to the market model of dialogue.

(b) The Coffee House Model. This is a friendlier and more sophisticated version of the ‘dialogue of strangers'. In this case, dialogue becomes an elite indulgence carried out, more often than not, in indifference to the burning plane of realities. Or, even when the pressure of circumstances occasions it, dialogue of this kind tends to lack the motivation to impact the ground realities. The emphasis is on the suaveness of arguments as well as the etiquettes and courtesies that must go with it. Inter-religious dialogues, in this approach, are undertaken almost as ends in themselves. These enterprises are evaluated and hailed in terms of their ritualistic finesse, the intellectual flair and personal flourish of the participants. The emphasis is on impressing each other rather than on healing the given situation or walking together towards a better and shared future.

Whether it be the Market Model or the Coffee House Model, the end result of these dialogues is that what begins as an encounter of strangers end as the adieu of strangers, except for what individuals gain in terms of personal networking. Often enlarging one's circle of influence and friendship is mistaken for a breakthrough in inter-religious goodwill. Hence it happened that communal hostilities continually aggravated in Afro-Asian contexts even as dialogists pursued their agenda.

II. The Dialogue of Neighbours In the second model, we enter into dialogue as neighbours. More precisely, we do so knowing that we begin as strangers who need to be neighbours. Dialogue is, essentially, a ‘neighbourly' activity. The neighbourhood need not be, to begin with, a garden of neighbourliness. It may, and does, accommodate strangers. But strangers do not have to remain estranged. When strangers remain estranged, neighbourhood becomes a theatre of alienation. The defining aspect of ‘neighbourliness' is ‘being with'. This ‘being with' is not just a physical or geographic category but also a mental and spiritual disposition. From such a perspective, religious plurality becomes basic to the beauty of the garden of life. Religions would, otherwise, be seen as religious thorns and thistles. In a sense, neighbourhood is not a given thing, but something that we are to work at, evolve and sustain. Dialogue is a powerful tool for attaining this end.

"Neighbour" means, literally, ‘near-dweller'. The quintessential thing about a neighbour is not his religion, but his nearness. This makes him a touchstone of our capacity for nearness. We must not underestimate the challenge that nearness poses. Putting up with a person at a ‘safe distance' is a lot easier than having him at close quarters, where he could be a bee in the bonnet! Of course, we overlook the fact that others become bees also because we are no more than bonnets. The business of spirituality is to enable us to be more than religious bonnets. It is also to enable us to wonder if we are bonnets because others are bees or whether they are bees because we are but mere bonnets!

Dialogue as a neighbourly activity has a clear goal: to overcome alienation and to eradicate the aberrations bred by it. Strange it is that we know next-to-nothing about each other's faith. Why, we know precious little about our own faith! Yet we are convinced that the religions of our neighbours are all darkness and error and, for that reason, they should be religiously suspect. Prejudice is understanding distorted by alienation, which amounts to malicious ignorance. The worst part of this ignorance is that we do not know that we are ignorant. Neighbourhood is not meant to be a heath of prejudices but a garden of goodwill. A sense of responsibility in this regard underlies inter-religious dialogue of the neighbourly model.

Neighbourhood belongs to children! We may be unsure of the adults, but there is no doubt at all that the children in a neighbourhood do not wish to be strangers to each other. Indeed, they play a significant role in enriching the neighbourliness of a neighbourhood. They are, at the same time, the prime victims of the erosion of that neighbourliness. If, over the decades, we have made only negligible progress along the narrow path of inter-religious understanding and good will, very likely it is because our dialogues stagger under the baggage of adult adroitness, defensiveness, dogmatism and power-play. Perhaps we need, as Jesus said, to turn back and become like children if we are to undertake dialogue as a neighbourly activity. Children are free to dialogue; for they are not conditioned by habit or enslaved by stereotypes or prejudices.

Children symbolize neighbourhood. They put the spotlight on needs. Adults may corrupt children into shifting from needs to desires. But the priority of needs in the world of children is indisputable. Dialogue must be focused on human needs which include, among other things, the need to dialogue in personal depth so as to eradicate alienation. Dialogue, in the matrix of needs, cannot be an exclusively verbal activity. Sensitivity to needs urges us to shift from the dialogue of words to the dialogue of deeds. To remain ghettoized and indifferent to common needs and to discover people of other faiths for purposes only of verbal dialogues is to reduce dialogue to a ritual.

Neighbourhood, finally, is not a sphere of power play but of love. The negativity that vitiates the inter-religious space presupposes a power-oriented mindset. Dialogue, in contrast, is an activity in love. Love is the light in which truth is seen best. The truth is that the stranger is a potential neighbour and the neighbour, in turn, is a potential friend. That is the sanctified common sense that underlies the exhortation to love one's enemies, which is also the touchstone for our credentials to dialogue. "Enemy" is a ‘stranger' who tests our spiritual resilience to its limits. He orients us, unless we are spiritually fortified against enmity, negatively, aggravating our allergy to differences. While religiosity over-values sameness and conformity, spirituality empowers us to cope creatively with the different and the contrary, which is a mark of our inner freedom. The perennial anaemia of inter-religious dialogues has been the well-meaning, but self-defeating, eagerness to sweep differences under the carpet in order to be able to focus on shared notions as though dialogue is little more than ‘birds of the same feather flocking together'. This owes, to a large measure, to the ‘bonsai approach' to dialogue. We shift and dwarf dialogue from the neighbourhood to distant and sterile locales, at a comfortable distance from contentious issues. This escapism -and the inability it breeds to engage, respect and transcend differences- paralyzes us in respect of the purpose of dialogue. Differences can co-exist harmoniously in the neighbourhood. Once we regain this simple but seminal foundation, we shall realize to our immense relief that dialogue is a natural activity to which not only experts but also people in all walks of life are spontaneously and refreshingly relevant.

* Rev. Valson THAMPU is an Indian Christian theologian, an academic and author. Currently he serves as member, National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions, in which capacity he addresses the educational needs of the 150 million religious minorities in India.