5 "Rules" for Religious Dialogue

I wrote the following almost 10 years ago. After posting on Facebook yesterday (a decision which, unfortunately, often proves fruitless), I decided to revisit, amend, and post this again. I’m largely drawing almost exclusively from Miroslav Volf’s book Flourishing for the first four “rules,” with some reflections. I have added a 5^th “rule,” or challenge of my own, since originally writing this.

A bit of background on where I’m coming from. First, I’ve always cared about multi-faith dialogue. You can read some of my reflections on Lesslie Newbigin’s helpful work on the topic if you’d like (start here). While I have always cared about multi-faith dialogue, I had the privilege of actually engaging such work up close when I worked as a chaplain for the Faith and Spirituality Centre at the University of Calgary for nearly five years (beginning in 2018). I formed many wonderful friendships and learned so much from people of other faith traditions during those years. These “rules,” therefore, have become more important to me than when I first wrote about them almost a decade ago. I hope you’ll reflect on them and perhaps put them into practice.

In Volf’s book, Flourishing, he explored, among other things, the ways that people of various religions can respect one another while remaining exclusivist (believing their religion is the one true way) in their beliefs. This is an important topic in such a time of religious volatility. Volf wrote briefly about four ways in which we can approach people of other religions with respect while not changing our beliefs in the process. Here they are with commentary of my own.

“First, we respect a religion by honoring its integrity. Instead of denigrating another religion by destroying its holy sites, burning its holy books, or insulting its founder, we help preserve and protect those.”^⁠¹

Most of us probably think, ‘No problem here – I’m certainly not out to burn religious sites or books.’ But it strikes me as quite common amongst certain religious people to insult the founders of other religions. Please note that Volf is not saying that we have to agree with doctrines that other religious leaders or founders espouse. Good dialogue always has disagreement, even sharp disagreement, but insult and disagreement are two different things.

Insult leads to hostility, never to peace. If we decide that a relationship with the “religious other” is a bridge worth burning, it is only a matter of time before we believe their books and sites are worth burning, too. But is it realistic to think that we could help preserve and protect their writings or site? John Ortberg, in his book Who Is This Man? writes that “Until the fourth century, the church was not in the book-burning business; only barbarians did that.” Not only were we not in the book-burning business, but we thought it important to save books that were religiously contrary to our view for cultural purposes. Ortberg again: “For many centuries, monasteries were the only institutions in Europe for the acquisition, preserving, and transmitting of knowledge. The single greatest preserver of pagan classical documents was followers of Jesus^⁠.”² If we really believe what we confess, we don’t need to be afraid of other people’s beliefs, and if we love our neighbors as ourselves, we must not mock things that are important to them, even if we believe that they are wholeheartedly wrong.

“Instead of distorting another religion by spreading false information about it, we endeavor to know it accurately – for instance, engaging it, we tarry in the posture of ‘non understanding,’ open to learn from those who study and practice it – and speak truthfully about it.” (123)

Again, most people would not confess to openly spreading false information about another religion. But there is a little thing called Facebook that might contradict our grand opinions of ourselves. I have, unfortunately, read many misleading or blatantly false posts, blogs, articles, etc., on Facebook about “those Muslims” in recent years. I’ve read, for example, shared posts about halal that made it seem as if Muslims are brutalizing animals during the halal process. The opposite is true. But of course, if I wanted to make you afraid of a people, I could easily do so by spreading false information about how they “brutally” slaughter animals. I read another article about 2 Muslim men who randomly threw acid on the face of an innocent woman. The article seemed suspect, so I did a 30-second search and quickly realized that it was false. I appeal to Christians to stop doing this.

Something that may seem more innocent is the grand claims we perpetuate without truly knowing if they are true. Many who have never studied Islam or read the Qur’an, for example, are happy to tell you all about the inexcusable baseline of all Muslim belief. This is to assume a posture of full-knowing, rather than “non understanding.” There is no room for curiosity or correction when we assume such a posture.

We don’t rush either to simply contrast another religion with our own or to declare that its adherents are unknowingly our own coreligionists…instead we honor both the commonalities of another religion with our own and its differences.

In other words, we don’t rush in and say “See! You’re actually just a Christian!” (“anonymous Christians” is the term Volf uses) or, on the other hand, fail to recognize any similarities that might exist (like the golden rule) because we want to prove that we are different. This is one of the things I appreciated about the Faith and Spirituality Centre where I worked. There was a refusal to flatten dialogue in either direction (such as ‘See, all roads lead to God. We’re pretty much the same,’ on the one hand, and “They are completely different from us,’ on the other). Such a flattening destroys curiosity and genuine dialogue.

“Finally, in evaluating a religion we judge fairly – for instance, we don’t compare our own religion at its best with another religion at its worst.” (123)

This is the “rule” that stands out to me most. I sadly see this happening all the time.

I will never forget the long plane ride to Greece shortly after 9/11, where I sat next to a man of a different religion who drilled me the entire trip about my religion. He mocked the food I ate. He asked me to show him my passport and compared my practically stamp-less document with his well-inked version. He said I was young and ignorant. He insulted me when I told him that I couldn’t read the Bible in its original language. This annoyed me, but none of it rattled me and I kept my cool. Then, he insinuated that all Christians were like the priests who had been found out to be child molesters in the scandal within the Roman Catholic Church.

Generalizing all Christians based on this terrible stain (we have other stains, too!) in our history is what finally got under my skin. This is not to deny the problem he brought up, or even deny that it was widespread. Yet what he was doing was using the worst of my religion to belittle me, and Christianity as a whole, in the process. If I don’t like being seen through my religion’s worst lens, then I must also refuse to categorize people of other religions by the worst moments in their history, or view them through that lens as well. A humble posture will recognize the worst in my religion as a barrier that must be overcome, rather than seeking the worst in the other’s religion.

It’s interesting that some version of the Golden Rule is common to religions. Volf draws particular notice to Jesus’ words “in everything.” In Matthew 7:12 Jesus says,

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”

I’ll add a fifth “rule” that I didn’t include in my original post.

When speaking of people groups, refuse the urge to generalize people into an idea.

The father of liberation theology, Gustavo Guitérrez, is said to have asked the following while wandering the streets of Lima:

“So you say you love the poor? Name them.”

It is easy to love the poor from a distance. To love the idea of the poor. Real love requires proximity. I have taken his poignant question and used it in the opposite direction:

“You want to talk about ’those Muslims?’ Name them.”

It is easy for all of us to talk about our ideas about people without actually having proximity to them. Sometimes I see people say, ‘There are a lot of Muslims where I live!’ I, too, lived in a place where there were a lot of Muslims. I didn’t know them, though. It wasn’t until I started spending hours with wonderful Muslim students that I really got to personally know actual Muslim people. When speaking of other religions, when at all possible, have a name and face that you actually know in front of your imagination.

Obviously, there are many other things that could be said here, but I hope this at least begins to scratch at the change in tone and posture needed surrounding these conversations. We can do better. All of us.

1. Miroslav Volf, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (Yale University Press, 2015), 123. All further references will be marked by page number within the post.

2. John Ortberg, Who Is This Man?: The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus (Zondervan, 2012), 65.