A Thinking Reed

Category: Interfaith

  • Friday links

    –On Christianity, the Holocaust, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

    –Recent posts on what’s apparently now being referred to as the “new universalism” from James K.A. Smith, Halden Doerge, and David Congdon.

    –Does having a monarchy lead to greater equality?

    –Redeeming the “L word.”

    –Appreciating both N.T. Wright’s and Marcus Borg’s views of the Resurrection.

    –Why liberals should embrace classical (small-r) republicanism.

    –Love and service are more fundamental than “rigorous theology.”

    –Was the Civil War a “tragedy“? (More here and here.)

    –Hiding the truth about factory farms.

    –Kate Middleton for the win.

    ADDED LATER: What’s going on with the Canadian election?

  • Unredeemed history and Christian anti-Judaism

    In her book Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Origins of Anti-Semitism, Rosemary Radford Ruether argues that a key difference between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity has been unwilling for much of its history to live with the tension of the unrealized messianic age. As a result, Christians have accused Jews of being blind to the “obvious” truth of Jesus’ messianic status and of misinterpreting their own scriptures, which (supposedly) clearly foretell Jesus.

    What Christians have often failed to understand, Ruether says, is that Jews have their own theologically rooted reasons for their “great refusal”:

    The assertion that the Jews are reprobate because they did not accept Christ as having already come is really a projection upon Judaism of that unredeemed side of itself that Christianity must constantly deny in order to assert that Christ has already come and founded “the Church.” The Jews represent that which Christianity must repress in itself, namely the recognition of history and Christian existence as unredeemed. In this sense, the Jews do indeed “kill Christ” for the Christian, since they preserve the memory of the original biblical meaning of the word Messiah which must judge present history and society as still unredeemed. For Judaism, Jesus cannot have been the Messiah, because the times remain unredeemed and neither he nor anything that came from him has yet altered that fact. In short, Judaism, in rejecting Jesus’ messianic status, is simply reaffirming the integrity of its own tradition about what the word Messiah means. Once the true nature of Judaism’s objection to Christian faith becomes clear, it becomes necessary to reappraise the meaning of Judaism’s Great Refusal. If Christian anti-Judaism is the suppression of the unredeemed side of itself and its projection of this upon Judaism, then Judaism’s negation of Christian faith must be recognized as a prophetic critique refused. (p. 245)

    In other words, Christian triumphalism has anti-Judaism as its inevitable corollary. Because it saw Christ’s advent and the founding of the church as the end of “unredeemed” history, Christianity concluded that the continuing existence of Jews and Judaism was a stubborn element of that history. Hence the characterization of Jews as “carnal,” “unspiritual,” etc. and the view that they were permanently objects of the divine wrath.

    But as Ruether points out, the empirical reality is that Christian history is not noticeably more “redeemed” or “spiritual” than what came before it or what continues to exist outside of it. Jews continue to witness to the fact that the advent of the Kingdom and the messianic age remains in the future.

    Earlier, Ruether writes:

    Those trained in traditional Christian theology will be pained by this discussion and declare that “Christ’s coming” has made an ultimate difference. What this means is that we know that we are “ultimately accepted.” We do not have to depend for our salvation upon our own efforts. But we have only to recall all the contradictions which have been produced by the efforts to make sense of this proposition. Either this means that everyone is finally accepted no matter what they do, obliterating any difference between good and evil. Or else it means that some are accepted and others are rejected no matter what they do, which makes God an amoral tyrant. In an effort to bring righteousness and election into tandem, one declares that the elect are known by their righteousness. Election is the basis of righteousness and not vice versa. We then embark on an all-consuming Puritan “legalism,” which seeks perfect righteousness, not to earn but to prove one’s election. Ordinary Christianity constantly abdicates from this whole discussion in practice and assumes the view that we are already loved by God, and yet must also do something to become what we are supposed to be. For such an ethic does one need a Messiah? It would seem that Creation, covenant, and commandments would be sufficient.

    The Church’s historical existence constantly evidences its premessianic actuality, while the proclamation that it is founded on the “new being” of Christ serves as much to hinder as to give it any perceptibly superior way of existing. Christian actuality has not transcended the human historical, i.e., unredeemed conditions known to Judaism. Yet, its messianic faith has made it a kind of mirror-opposite of Judaism. Judaism believes it has the commandments, can obey the commandments well enough to be in friendship with God, and yet the final resolution of the tension of letter and spirit is not yet. Christianity holds up the final redeemed moment of the “end” as its already established foundation. Yet it proves no more capable than Judaism of producing that final eschatological transfiguration of existence in practice, while losing the commandments that assured Judaism that it had the “way” to the “end.” For Christianity, there can be no “way” to the “end,” because the “end” (Christ) is the “way.” For Judaism, which had Torah without the Messiah, Christianity substitutes the Messiah without Torah. But the effort to deal with the finite as though one were already based on the Final produces myriad self-delusions; either one constantly rejects the finite qua finite, or else attempts to absolutize a particular givenness as final. (pp. 243-4)

    One thing Christianity needs to do, according to Ruether, is to recover the proleptic nature of its witness. Christ is a foretaste of the Kingdom, not the Kingdom come in its fullness. A Christianity that emphasizes the ever-future aspect of the Kingdom and the fact that history continues unredeemed–with all the ambiguity that entails–will be better able to extend charity and tolerance to other “ways,” including Judaism.

  • Friday links

    –The Australian broadcaster ABC’s Religion and Ethics site has a series of articles by Martha Nussbaum on democracy and education: parts 1, 2, and 3.

    –Coal is not cheap.

    –Vegan nutritionist Virginia Messina argues that healthy diets can include meat analogues. (A corrective of sorts to anti-processed-food extremism.)

    –At the great metal blog Invisible Oranges: why lyrics matter.

    –Camassia has the first part of a review of Miroslav Volf’s interesting-sounding new book Allah: A Christian Response.

    –Radiohead has released their new album “King of Limbs” a day early. You can download it here. I haven’t heard it yet, but the early reviews seem to be mixed. On the other hand, Radiohead albums generally take several listens to digest, so I’m withholding judgment.

    –Paul Krugman on the budget “debate.”

    –What’s going on in Bahrain?

    –The Madison protests are about union-busting, not budget cuts.

    –The history of using the National Guard to break strikes.

    –According the calendar observed by Lutheran and some other Protestant churches, today is Martin Luther’s feast day (he died on this date in 1546).

    ADDED LATER: The Nation‘s “Breakdown” podcast, hosted by Chris Hayes, tackles “the confusing concepts that make politics, economics and government tick” via questions submitted by listeners. This week’s episode tries to answer a question I asked: Why exactly are government deficits bad? (If or when they are.) Chris’s guest is economist Robert Pollin. You can listen here.

    This seems appropriate for today:

  • An experiment in apologetics

    Camassia recently wrote a post following up on a discussion we were having here about religious pluralism, specifically with regard to Marjorie Suchocki’s book Divinity and Diversity (see my original post here). One of the issues that came up in the ensuing discussion was whether affirming religious pluralism means you’re excluded from contending for truth of your own views. Does it just mean affirming everyone in their okayness?

    This got me thinking about what apologetics would look like if it were conducted in a context that took full account of religious pluralism. A few months back, Christopher tipped me off to Krister Stendahls’ “rules” for interreligious dialogue:

    (1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
    (2) Don’t compare your best to their worst.
    (3) Leave room for “holy envy.” (By this, Stendahl seems to have meant that we should be open to finidng attractive or truthful elements in other religions that aren’t necessarily present in our own.)

    These principles pose some seriously critical questions to much of what sails under the flag of Christian apologetics. It seems to me that apologetics has rarely–if ever–been undertaken in the spirit of Stendahl’s rules. It’s almost irresistible for the apologist to give short shrift to other traditions in order to make his case look stronger. But a truly responsible apologetics would have to enter into a deep and sympathetic understanding of other traditions, something along the lines of what Stendahl suggests.

    Doing this well would require the cultivation of certain virtues: charity, open-mindedness, empathy, intellectual honesty, and so on. It would require the apologist to actually talk to adherents of other religions, to ask them why they believe what they believe and do what they do. It would require being open to correction on one’s understanding of that tradition. But at this point it appears that something like inter-religious dialogue is actually a part of, or at least a prerequisite for doing honest apologetics.

    And I wonder if we can take this a step further. I wonder if the best form of apologetics for a world of religious pluralism is what we could call “imaginative apologetics.” That is, rather than trying to produce rationally coercive arguments, this form of apologetics would elaborate a “thick” description of Christian faith and life, one that would invite imaginative sympathy, i.e., one’s interlocutor would be invited to see the world through “Christian eyes.”

    As the name suggests, I’m inspired in this suggestion by C.S. Lewis, who as I noted the other day, has been called an “imaginative theologian.” This is bolstered by my recent reading of Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism, in which he argues that good literature invites the reader to experience the world from a new point of view:

    We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. We are not content to be Leibnitzian monads. We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors. (Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, pp. 137-8)

    Correlatively, then, good reading for Lewis is being receptive to entering into this new perspective. Analogously then, in the realm of inter-religious dialogue, we should be willing to provide an imaginative description of our own religious worldview and open to entering imaginatively into the worldview of others.

    Another thing to be said for this view is that it recognizes that general views of the world (whether religious or not) don’t admit of the kind of rational demonstration we might like, and they all have their own unresolved problems. So we shouldn’t expect to establish their truth in a straightforward way, whether deductively or inductively. It’s more a matter of imaginatively assuming or adopting a particular perspective, and looking at the world through it, to see the world in a new, and possibly more satisfying (intellectually, morally, aesthetically, etc.) way. (Although Lewis might have had a more rationalistic understanding of his own apologetic works, if one looks at the Lewis corpus as a whole, one sees that he was a master of just this kind of imaginative apologetics.)

    And it’s at just this point that the line between what I’m calling imaginative apologetics and dialogue starts to get fuzzy. Both involve articulating the deep wellsprings of our own faith and offering it to the other for her consideration. And both require, in turn, a receptiveness to the other’s perspective. We can’t predict in advance whether the outcome will be her adopting our perspective or us adopting hers, or possibly some kind of mutual modification of views. But this seems consistent with the Christian view that conversion is ultimately a mystery and a matter for the Holy Spirit.

  • Is Jesus God?

    Last night I finished reading James D. G. Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? Dunn, a professor at the University of Durham in England and noted scholar, looks specifically at the New Testament evidence to determine whether Jesus was worshipped by the early church. The question may seem like a no-brainer, but Dunn finds that the evidence warrants more than a simple yes or no answer.

    Dunn considers several strands of evidence. First, he looks at the various Greek words (e.g., proskynein) that can be translated as “worship”–as well as related terms, hymns, benedictions, and doxologies–and whether they are used in reference to Jesus. He also looks as various “cultic” practices associated with religion (sacred space, sacred time, sacrifice, cultic priesthood) and whether these practices were directed toward Jesus. Next, he considers the ways in which Hebrew biblical thought has characterized various “intermediaries” between God and the world (angels, spirit, wisdom, word, and exalted human beings) and how these qualified the Bible’s monotheism without lapsing into polytheism. Finally, Dunn considers Jesus’ own religious beliefs (to the extent they can be identified) and the early church’s confession of him as “Lord.”

    The picture that emerges is a nuanced one. Dunn contends that evidence for the direct worship of Jesus in the New Testament is rare (though not nonexistent, e.g., Revelation). Instead, the texts generally indicate that the early Christians experienced Jesus as the one in whom and through whom they were able to worship the one God of Israel. Dunn puts considerable weight on Jesus understood as the embodiment or incarnation of the word or wisdom of God, which, he maintains, is importantly different from simply saying “Jesus is God.” In biblical Judaism (possibly influenced by Hellenism), the word or wisdom of God was understood as the aspect or manifestation of the divine that “faced toward” creation–these terms refer to God’s immanent presence among God’s creatures and as the ordering principle of creation. But God in Godself–the ultimate source and goal of all that is–remains “beyond” and inaccessible.

    What emerges consistently … is that the earliest Christians radically reinterpreted the language and imagery by which Israel’s sages and theologians spoke of God’s perceptible activity within human experience by filling it out by reference to Jesus. The creative energy of God, the moral character of the cosmos, the inspiration experienced by prophets, the saving purpose of God for his people all came to fuller/fullest expression in Christ. This did not mean that Jesus should be worshipped in himself, any more than the Word as such, divine Wisdom as such or the Spirit of God as such was or should have been worshipped. But it did mean that as the divine self-revelation, though Spirit, Wisdom and Word, more fully informed and enabled worship of the one God, the same was even more the case with Christ. As early as the first Christians, it was recognized that the one God should be worshipped as the God active in and through Jesus, indeed, in a real sense as Jesus–Jesus as the clearest self-revelation of the one God ever given to humankind. (p. 129)

    In Dunn’s view, New Testament Christianity remains a strongly monotheistic faith, but one that recognizes–in line with this tradition of Jewish/Hellenistic reflection–multiple aspects within the godhead that are not best understood as composing an undifferentiated, monistic unity. It is a faith that sees Jesus as the clearest self-revelation of the divine character and the one in whom Christians worship God. Jesus is both “God-with-us” and our heavenly mediator who intercedes for us before the Father. And he is our elder brother, into whose pattern we are conformed by God’s grace. What is distinctive of Christianity is not that it is “less monotheistic” than, say, Judaism or Islam, but that Christian worship of God is enabled by and revealed in and through Jesus (see p. 151).

    Christologies are often divided into “functional” (what Jesus does) and “ontic” (what Jesus is) varieties. Dunn sees the New Testament evidence pointing toward a Christology of “divine agency,” which seems to land more on the functional side. Jesus “embodied God’s immanence…he was the visible image of the invisible God..[and] as full an expression of God’s creative and redemptive concern and action as was possible in flesh” (p. 143). But, he concludes, the New Testament (generally) stops short of saying that “Jesus is God” in a straightforward sense.

    Dunn seems to suggest that this New Testament view is inconsistent–or at least in tension–with later Christian developments. He mentions, for example, that Christians often risk falling into “Jesus-olatry”–treating Jesus as an idol rather than as an icon through which we “see” God (see pp. 147-8). I would have liked to see him flesh this out a bit more. As it stands, I’m unclear just where (or if) he thinks a sophisticated orthodox trinitarian theology would diverge from the New Testament witness as he has articulated it.

  • From inclusivism to (soft) pluralism?

    In his contribution to the collection Abraham’s Children: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conversation, Keith Ward offers a sketch of three different kinds of Christian religious pluralism:

    Inclusive pluralism: The Wisdom of God that is embodied in Jesus is also available or present elsewhere. All humans participate in and can access this Wisdom, at least to some extent. “Jesus is the full embodiment of a truth dimly perceived by all since the beginning of history” (Abraham’s Children, p. 192). God wants everyone to be saved, and since many people have, through no fault of their own, not been made aware of the revelation of Jesus, there must be saving truth available outside the bounds of Christianity. Ward calls this “inclusive pluralism.” There are many paths to God leading to the possibility of eternal life, but the Christian path “shows most adequately what God is” (p. 193). What makes this a form of pluralism, rather than just inclusivism, I think, is that it allows for a positive role for other traditions (i.e., it doesn’t hold that all “good” adherents of other faiths are just “anonymous Christians”), even if it does give a certain priority to Christianity.

    Hard pluralism: All religious paths (or all “great” religious paths) are equally true or valid ways of achieving salvation or approaching God. Because there is no conclusive evidence establishing the truth of any one tradition, all positions are equally justified and we cannot say that one is more “true” than the others. Ward associates this view with John Hick and also refers to it as “metaphysical pluralism.” Ward thinks that this view is basically incoherent because, as a matter of fact, different religions make contradictory truth-claims, and not just about peripheral matters. So, as a matter of logic, not all religions can be equally true. I think that it might be more accurate to say that, on Hick’s view, none of the claims of the various religions are literally true, or at least true in such a way as to actually contradict one another. This, however, leads to the familiar problem of whether one can say anything positive about “the Real” (as Hick refers to ultimate reality). Even symbolic or metaphorical truth is only true if it bears some appropriate relationship to that which it symbolizes.

    Soft pluralism: Not all religious paths are true (or equally true), but because we lack the kind of interpersonally available evidence that would convince any rational person that a particular religion is true (or more true than all the others), people of various faiths may all be justified in their different beliefs even if not all of those beliefs are (or can be) simultaneously true. Ward also calls this “epistemic pluralism” since it rejects the pluralism of truth, but accepts the pluralism of justification. Going further, Ward says that this soft (epistemic) pluralism, rather than being regrettable, may actually be a positive good. This is because it respects freedom of conscience (everyone should be free to make up their own mind about religious matters) and the fact that no one can claim a monopoly on truth, particularly when it comes to grasping the ineffable nature of the divine. (These are similar to some of the considerations J. S. Mill brings to bear in his argument for freedom of thought more generally in On Liberty.) Christian thought and experience can be enriched by the symbols and insights of other traditions because the infinity of God implies that there is more truth than what we see in Jesus, even if Jesus is (we think) the clearest embodiment of God’s Wisdom.

    While some Christians continue to be exclusivists–i.e., they hold that salvation and eternal life are only possible by a conscious relationship to Christianity (whether that is defined as belonging to a particular church or making some conscious act of explicit faith), Ward notes that the mainstream Christian tradition (including Catholicism) has moved toward some version of inclusive pluralism and that further considerations nudge us toward soft (epistemic) pluralism. (Soft pluralism actually seems to me to be compatible with inclusive pluralism; it doesn’t require Christians to give up the belief that Jesus is the fullest revelation of God’s Wisdom or that people outside the bounds of Christianity participate in that Wisdom.) The implications for mission, Ward says, are that Christians should focus on serving the well-being of others and witnessing to the love of God in Jesus, rather than worrying about getting everyone to convert to Christianity.

    I think Ward’s typology is helpful, and I think his considerations for affirming a modest epistemic pluralism are strong ones. Whether one could (or should) go beyond that to a “harder” form of pluralism is, I think, an open question. The move to hard pluralism always seems to risk metaphysical relativism or complete apophatic reticence in saying anything at all about God/ the Sacred. Interestingly, the practical implications Ward draws in terms of mission and dialogue are very similar to Suchocki’s, even though the latter seems to be a more thorough-going pluralist.

    UPDATE: See here and here for older posts making some similar points. I’m starting to wonder if I ever say anything I haven’t already said before.

  • Follow-up on Suchocki and pluralism

    Kevin Kim (a.k.a. the Big Hominid) has some thoughts and questions riffing on my post about Marjorie Suchocki’s Divinity and Diverstiy. I think Kevin pinpoints a certain ambiguity in Suchocki’s position, one that I wrestled with.

    It seems to me that Suchocki could either be characterized as a pluralist or as a modified inclusivist. This ambiguity is most pronounced, I think, in her treatment of the competing truth-claims of different religions. On the one hand, Suchocki affirms the existence of God and describes other religions as culturally conditioned responses to God’s call and presence in the world. This sounds like an inclusivist position, at least to the extent that it implies that the truth is more fully revealed in Christianity (or at least in theistic traditions generally) than in non-theistic traditions.

    On the other hand, Suchocki also argues that the conceptual articulations of the various religions are abstractions from and grow out of the soil of a more immediate experience of ultimate reality and that, when detached from that experience, it doesn’t really make sense to ask if one is “truer” than another. That sounds a lot like a “constructivist” position in the mold of John Hick, where ultimate reality is ineffable and the various religions are cultural responses to the Real. Ultimately, it’s not clear to me that these two tendencies are fully compatible.

  • Toward a Christian affirmation of religious pluralism

    Over the holiday weekend I read Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki’s Divinity and Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism. Though it only clocks in at about 120 pages, it’s one of the better books I’ve read on the subject.

    Suchocki, professor emerita of the Claremont School of Theology and a noted process and feminist theologian, takes an different approach than many pluralists by arguing that we find support for religious pluralism in certain core Christian convictions. These include God as creator, God as incarnate, humanity as created in the image of God, and the reign of God as the goal of earthly community.

    Using a process-relational model of creation, Suchocki argues that God creates the world by evoking a freely given response from creatures, not by unilaterally determining what happens. Because of this element of free play, creation displays great diversity. The diversity of religion–humanity’s response to the sacred–is one aspect of this. This same creator God is “radically incarnate” in creation: by presenting possibilities for creatures to realize, God allows them to incarnate an aspect of the divine, if only in a limited and partial way. The great religious traditions are instances of this kind of culturally conditioned response to an experience of God. While they may seem to conflict, or even to be incommensurable, at the level of conceptualizations, these concepts are abstractions from an experience of the God who is deeply present in the world.

    In contrast to much of the Christian tradition, Suchocki argues that the imago dei should be understood as a collective characteristic of the entire human race, as opposed to a more individualistic understanding. She bases this on the trinitarian nature of God as a community of irreducibly different persons. It is only by creating a community of diverse communities, not by erasing difference, that humanity fully images the divine. Similarly, the reign of God is the state of affairs characterized by transcending the preference for “our kind” and fostering the well-being for all, including the stranger. The stranger is welcomed as a stranger, not by being assimilated and required to sacrifice that which makes her different.

    All of these considerations, Suchocki maintains, point toward religious diversity as good and as part of God’s will for humanity. The great religions are free responses to the experience of the sacred, which are rooted in genuine experience of God. To live up to our calling to reflect the image of God, we should welcome and celebrate difference, including the religious “stranger,” rather than require everyone to profess the same faith.

    Suchocki considers the implications of affirming religious pluralism for two key issues: salvation and mission. Regarding the former, she contends that Jesus truly mediates saving grace, but that doesn’t mean that only Jesus does so. The divine presence manifests itself within and adapts itself to locally prevailing conditions. The questions that other people ask may not even necessarily be the ones that Christianity answers (she points out that some Eastern traditions are more concerned with eliminating suffering than sin, for instance). Jesus reveals God’s love and the life of humanity truly united to God, and the power of this grace-full event is amplified by the texts, traditions, and stories that have emerged in its wake. But this doesn’t mean that no other stories or traditions have the power to save.

    The implication for mission is that Christians should not seek to convert others (though conversions may still happen, of course). Instead, they should aim to form friendships with those of other faiths and to share what is most valuable in their tradition, as well as being prepared to learn from the religious other. This creates a very real possibility of mutual transformation. At the very least it should lead to deepened understanding and a willingness to work together for the common good.

    What I like about Suchocki’s position is that, unlike some pluralists, she doesn’t try to assume a “view from nowhere”, outside of any particular tradition. Too often, this results in a kind of lowest-common-denominator theology or a covert attempt to impose the standards of one tradition on others without acknowledging it. Instead, Suchocki is contending for religious pluralism on explicitly Christian grounds. More traditional Christians will take issue with some of her conclusions, particularly her apparent relativizing of the salvific importance of Jesus. And I think it’s fair to ask how we’re supposed to maintain that the Christian tradition is normative for us once we’ve made such relativizing moves. However, I think she makes a strong argument that the diversity of religions may be God’s will and that Christians should stop thinking that the ideal would be for all other faiths to vanish because everyone converted to Christianity.

  • The historical Jesus as a norm of Christology

    Over the weekend I read A. Roy Eckardt’s Reclaiming the Jesus of History: Christology Today. The book is more interesting than the title suggests; Eckardt writes in conversation not only with “historical Jesus” studies, but also with feminist theology, theology of religions, liberation theology, and particularly “post-Shoah” theology. His stated goal is to develop a Christology that maintains the distinctiveness of Christianity without adopting a triumphalist or supersessionist stance toward other traditions (preeminently Judaism).

    In Eckardt’s view, the historical Jesus is indispensable for any viable Christology. This doesn’t mean that the content of Christology can be completely determined by historical study. Rather, Eckardt adopts what he calls a “Lockean” view of the matter, based on an analogy with John Locke’s position on the relationship between faith and reason. Locke’s view was that religious truth can be based on reason or go “beyond” reason, but it can’t contradict reason. Likewise, Eckardt says, theological truth can be based on history, or go “beyond” history, but it can’t contradict history.

    What’s the practical upshot of this? Well, here’s a pertinent example. Since we know that the historical Jesus was a faithful Jew who never broke with the tradition of his ancestors, any Christology that would imply that God’s covenant with Israel has been nullified or superseded would be automatically suspect. The Jesus of history, in this view, provides a kind of negative criteria for judging theological constructions.

  • Stendahl’s rules

    Krister Stendahl was a Swedish Lutheran theologian, New Testament scholar, and ultimately a bishop of the Church of Sweden. He’s probably best known for arguing that St. Paul’s letters were responding to a specific context–namely the relationship between Jews and Gentiles and his mission to the latter. According to Stendahl, much Western theology (Lutheran in particular) has misunderstood Paul by projecting onto him later conflicts, such as Luther’s with the Catholic Church, resulting in an overly “psychological” understanding of Paul’s teaching on faith and justification (the “introspective conscience of the West” as he puts it). Stendahl’s argument was an important impetus for the so-called new perspective on Paul. His book Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, which coincidentally I just started reading, collects some of his best known essays on this general topic.

    But I didn’t know–until Christopher noted it in a comment–that Stendahl is also known for three “rules” for interreligious dialogue:

    (1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.

    (2) Don’t compare your best to their worst.

    (3) Leave room for “holy envy.” (By this, Stendahl seems to have meant that we should be open to finidng attractive or truthful elements in other religions that aren’t necessarily present in our own.)

    According to Wikipedia, Stendahl articulated these rules during a press conference in which he was responding to opponents of building a Mormon temple in Stockholm. Stendahl’s rules call for just the kind of approach to other religions that I was commending here.