From God"s Perspective
We Are All Minorities
by Krister Stendahl
I have found from experience that there is something special about multilateral dialogue,
one in which we are all minorities, for the simple reason that in so much of religious
history the relation among religions has usually been defined in terms of differencesone"s
identity being defined by that which is different from the other. This is so natural to our
whole habit of thinking it is hard for us to conceive a way of defining our identity by that
which makes us glad. Multilateral dialogue nurtures that vision: that in the eyes of God we
are all minorities. In this plural and diverse situation and the increased consciousness of
that being so, the attempt at a common denominator approach has proved increasingly hard to
work. When it has succeeded, it has just created one new religionas if we needed another
one. Nor is tolerance quite the solution. It usually has an elitist lining; either an
elitist lining in the sense that you can be tolerant because for you it is not that
important, or an elitist lining of noblesse obligeI know, but I cannot expect the
other to know as much as I do.
These approaches do not work very well, once one wakes up to radical pluralism. Nor does
the model in which one anticipates the victory of one over the many, work either. Many of
you have heard me use as symbolic of this attitude the fact that ninety years ago in the
United States, we got a journal called The Christian Century. It"s a very enlightened
journal. It even switched from Gothic print to Latin letters in its masthead some twenty
years ago. But it is sort of cute to think that at the beginning of this century Americans
really believed that with American know-how and a little help from God we would end up by
the year 2000 in a christianized world. What actually happened was an enormous renewal of
the major religions of the world: great meetings, in Rangoon I think, in the 30s and 40s
revivifying the Buddhist canon; the end of the classical form of Jewish assimilation after
the Shoah and the establishment of the state of Israel; Hinduism in its various
shapes and forms becoming a reality in practically all parts of the Western world. And the
number of Muslims outnumbering the Jews in many parts of the West. That"s what happenedwhat
happened was that Gandhi became the rejuvenator of the social consciousness of Martin Luther
King. What happened was quite different from what was expected. So the only alternative is a
plural alternative, and so I ask myself: how to sing my song to Jesus with abandon without
telling negative stories about others! Or, if you want to sound more academic: "Towards
a Christian theology of religions."
And I want to deal with that subject very seriously tonight, and I want to do it as a
biblical scholar or at least as a reader of the Bible that I love. I want to deal with
questions of how one, as a Bible-tutored Christian, can come to think about God"s whole
menagerie and the place of the Christian Church and the Christian religion in the midst of
it. How, in the wider missio dei, are we to define the missio christi and the missio
ecclesia, to use terms which Catholic theologians have used to cope with this problem.
How to define the wider mission of God, the specific mission of Christ and the way in which
the mission of the Church fits into God"s total plan? That"s a risky subject and I have
decided to forget that some of you must have heard me say similar things for some time. But
I think I have some new thoughts towards the end, so bear with me.
It seems that there are clear words against any suchenterprise of radical
pluralism. I will start by lifting up three famous scriptural passages which seem to close
the matter before we have opened it:
(1) Acts 4:12: ... for there is no other name under heaven given among human beings
whereby we must be saved.
(2) John 14:6: ... I am the way the truth and the life. no one comes to the Father
except through me.
(3) Matthew 28:19: ... Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
1. I have an old exegetical rule which says that when you apply the right answer to the
wrong question, it will always be wrong, even if—or especially ifthe answer is God"s
word. Now what was the question to which Peter gave that answer in Acts?
The question was the accusation, the accusation that Peter had performed the miracle of a
magician in his own name and he answers by the exclamation: "Heavens no, in no other
name is there salvation but Jesus." This does not relate to the problem of Christianity
and Buddhismat least not on the conscious level. But words like that grow legs and walk
out of their context. And even when that is legitimate we must also remind ourselves of the
very nature of confessional language. As Eastern Christianity has always known better than
the West, confessional language is doxological. It is a way of praising God. It is the
primary language of faith. The home language of the Church is the language of prayer,
worship and doxology, giving praise out of the fullness of one"s heart. Actually,
confessional and liturgical and doxological language is a kind of caressing language by
which we express our devotion with abandon and joy. Raymond Brown, the outstanding Roman
Catholic exegete, in writing about the development of Biblical studies in the Roman Catholic
Church, hails Pius the XII"s encyclical of 1943, long before Vatican II, as the milestone in
setting Biblical scholarship free in Catholic studies. This the encyclical did when it
admitted or even hailed the fact that in studying scriptures you have to study the genre,
the style, the nature of the language it has, so that you don"t read it in the wrong key. I
think this is apropos to Acts 4:12. I can preach wonderful sermons on this but I have to
restrict myself.
2. The Johannine passage is found in the beginning of what is called the farewell speech
of Jesus The setting is this: "Do not be upset in your hearts, believe in God, believe
also in me. I"m going to leave you, but in this world there are many waysmany waysfor
you to stay. If there were not I would take you with me right now, but you can stay here.
Don"t worry ... And you know the way to where I am going." Then Thomas asks: "But
we don"t know where you arc going. How can we then know the way?" Thomas is always
pretty smart, good questions, good logic. Jesus said to him: "I am the way, the truth
and the life. Nobody comes to the Father except through me."
It strikes me very odd to take a passage from the most intimate and tender conversation
with the most intimate and closest circle of disciples, from a context in which their hearts
are full of foreboding with the imminent fear of relations about to be severed, to lift a
word from that conversation, and use it in answering the question of Christianity"s relation
to other religions. It is just not apropos. It is odd that one of the few passages that are
used by those who have closed the doors on a theology of religions in Christianity, should
be a passage which is dealing not with the question of the periphery or the margins or
exclusion, but which, on the contrary, lies at the very heart of the mystery of what came to
be the Trinity: the relation between the Father and the Son.
3. Anyone who reads Matthew"s gospel finds this a rather stunning statement towards the
end, because Matthew"s gospel is totally built on the theory that during the ministry of
Jesus, neither Jesus nor the disciples were to move outside Israel. Matthew has rather
striking statements: "Do not go to any Gentiles ... You will not lack cities in Israel
before the Son of Man appears" (10:5 and 23). This concentration on the mission to
Israel has its contrast in the announcement of the Gentile mission in the last verses of the
Gospel"all the nations" refers to "all the Gentiles". But what kind of a
mission is this? How did Matthewif we start on that levelthink of this mission? Did he
think of it as a saturation mission, did he think of it as the christianization of the
world, the cosmos?
I think we can be very clear that Matthew thinks of the mission of the Church on a
minority model, as did Paul. You will remember that in Romans 15 Paul says, "I have a
principle: never run a mission where anybody else has preached the gospel before. And now I
have run out of space, there is no place for me to go in the East. So I have to go to Spain,
I have to go West." That"s an odd way of looking at things. What matters to Paul seems
to be establishing a presence, a small minority in these centers of the East. It is a
minority image, it is the establishment, as I like to say, of Laboratory II. Israel was
Laboratory I, and when God felt that some good things had been achieved in Laboratory I God
said "Let"s now try it out on a somewhat broader basis ... on a Gentile basis";
but still a laboratory with Christians as the guinea pigs, Christians as another
"peculiar people."
The images in the gospel of Matthew are minority images: "You are the salt of the
earth." Nobody wants the world to be a salt mine. "You are the light of the world
and let your light so shine before the people that they see your good deeds and become
Christians." That"s not what it says.. It says: that they see your good deeds
and praise your Father who is in Heaven, have some reason forjoy, that"s what it
says. And think of the magithe Ayatullahs from Iran. They did not start the church when
they got home. We might in retrospect think that was sad; anyway they didn"t, and it doesn"t
seem to bother Matthew. Because for Matthew they got the experience of their life and they
had touched the holiness of God"s kingdom. Matthew"s perspective is centered in what we
refer to as the Kingdom. I"ll come back to that.
So these three pivotal passages from Acts, John and Matthew are not as simple as one
might think. They are opening up perspectives. Let us take the special case of Matthew.
Matthew operates with what I call the Biblical model, the Jewish model (of Isaiah 49 and
many other texts), the understanding that Israel is to be a light to the Gentiles, a theme
Luke picks up in the Song of Simeon and recited in large parts of Christendom every evening,
"a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel" (Luke 2:32).
This is a peculiar view. Judaism is a revelatory religion, a religion of the book, a
religion of salvation a revelatory religion, however, that at the same time doesn"t think
that everybody has to be a Jew in order to be acceptable to God. Now once that structure of
religion came into the hands of Christianity and Islam, it was coupled with universalism in
such a manner that no one could be acceptable to God who did not think and believe as
Christians and Muslims think and believe.
That is why, in the world of pluralism, it is not so strange that Christians who wake up
to the fact that they are not any more a self-evident majority should find their way to the
Jews and ask them: "You have lived for a pretty long time as a minority, do you have a
secret to share with us?" And the secret is quite simply this, that universalism is the
ultimate arrogance in the realm of religion. It is by definition and unavoidably spiritual
colonialism, spiritual imperialism. The Crusades can be more civilized but they will still
be Crusades, by definition. And the insight of a revelatory non-universalism is this: to be
a particular, even a peculiar people, somehow neededby God as a witness, faithful,
doing what God has told them to do, but not claiming to be the whole.
But particularism has been so ridiculed, especially after the Enlightenment. Have you
ever read Voltaire"s anti-Jewish statements? They are all based on the alleged tribal
primitiveness and particularity of Judaism. But I would suggest revelatory religion without
such a particularism instead of a universalism is lethal. That"s my lesson and I am very
intrigued as a student of the gospel of Matthew that Matthean thinking constructed that same
model: the church being another peculiar people, willed by God to have a function (what I
earlier called Laboratory II), now built on a Gentile base, panta ta ethne, disciples
of all the Gentile nations, yet still a minority. This is beautifully expressed in the
sublime eschatological vision of Micah 4:5: Thus God will judge among the many peoples and
arbitrate for the multitude of nations, however distant, and they shall beat their swords
into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not take up sword against nation,
they shall never again know war or learn war. But every man shall sit under his grapevine
and/or fig tree with no one to disturb him. For it was the Lord of Hosts who spoke: for all
people will walk, each in the names of their Gods, and we will walk in the name of the Lord
our God for ever and ever. Its quite a stunning vision. I have used a Rabbinic scholar
E.E. Urbach"s translation with an and rather than a but in the last sentence: and
we will walk ... Urbach, in his discussion about similar matters in one of the famous
volumes on Jewish and Christian self-definition, E.P. Sanders et al. (eds.), Jewish and
Christian Self-Definition, Vol II (1981), p. 298 says: "In their relations with
other nations, most of the sages (i.e. Rabbis) would have satisfied themselves with the
declaration of Micah 4:5."
Matthew suggests to me that he thought of the church as a church of such a peculiar
people in a new key. Universalism comes with power, Constantinian or otherwise. I think
there are two alternatives to thinking what it is all about from a Christian perspective;
and if I want to use drastic images I would say:What is the first thing that God
asks when God comes to the oval office in the morning? Is it for a printout of the latest
salvation statistics of the Christian churches? Or is it a question like: Has there been any
progress towards the Kingdom and, by the way, what has the role of the Christians been in
that? Or is it totally an accident that in the very last vision on the very last pages of
the Christian Bible there is, for us theologians, priests and ministers, that shocking
statement: "And I saw no temple in that city." There is something rather striking
about a religious tradition which envisions the consummation not as the cathedral of
cathedrals, but as a city in which there was no temple.
Now I have to speed up. I want to lift up two other texts, "model texts" as I callthem.
These are intimations, models of attitude, which I find important towards building theology,
which I cannot do. I am not a systematic theologian. I am just a Bible scholarproviding a
little Biblical encouragement to the theologians" models. One would of course expect that
the first person, the first theologianthe first Christian theologianwho saw the spectre
of Christian antisemitism and anti-Judaism coming, was the apostle Paul. He detected, in his
Gentile followers, an attitude of superiority towards Israel, not only towards Judaism but
towards Israel, the people, the Jews. And his missionary strategy is contained in Romans,
Chapters 9-11. The Calvinists thought it was a tractate on predestination because they were
interested in that, but it"s actually Paul"s ruminations on how his mission to the Gentiles
fits into God"s plans and how it relates to the people of Israel. Paul ends with a scathing
critique of Gentile Christians and their attitude of superiority towards Israel (11: 11ff).
He uses a lot of images of olive trees and things and grafting and he gets so upset he mixes
up what grafting actually does to a tree and so forth. But we have to ascribe that to his
intensity of feelingor to his lack of knowledge about horticulture. He was a city boy. I
feel for him. He is trying to come to grips with this fact that there is this feeling of
superiority and he doesn"t like it. And he ultimately says: I"ll tell you a mystery, lest
you be conceited. And that is that the whole of Israel will in due time be saved, and that"s
none of your business because God won"t go back on His promises. And he doesn"t actually say
this is going to happen because they are going to accept Jesus as the Messiah. And the
doxology he ends with is the only one he wrotein straight God-language without
anyple istological twist.
When I speak about this, theologians get very upset and they say "You teach two ways
to salvation: one for Israel and one for the rest of humankind." And I say "No, I
say with Paul that it is a mysteryif I taught two ways it would be a traffic plan."
But Paul is trying to set in various ways a kind of limit to missionary zeal. And why? I
know why: He had been burnt once. It was out of religious zeal that he committed the only
thing that he ever confesses as a sin: having persecuted the Church of Jesus Christ. So he
was aware of the risk of such zeal.
The other text is of another nature. It is Paul"s reflection on pluralism when he is up
against it in Corinth, in First Corinthians. Paul was not a great ecumenist through most of
his ministry. And in Galatians it seems that he really thought that if he stamped his foot
enough they would really go with him. And he says: "Even if an angel from heaven comes
and teaches otherwise than I taught you, let that angel be accursed!" That"s Chutzpah!
But in Corinth he is low on the totem pole and he is almost going to be read out of the
Church so he has to settle for ecumenism. He is in minority status and that"s perhaps why it
is in that Epistle that his basic thinking about love, as the elasticity which makes it
possible to have diversity, is born. The ode to love in First Corinthians is not speaking
about love in general but is Paul"s solution to the problem of how diversity can be an asset
instead of a liability. Now, what is so interesting to me in this context is how Paul
presents the problem, and the ensuing insight. To deal with different theologies as if they
were competing philosophieson the model of Stoicism and Epicureanism, etc. is wrong and
shows no understanding of the nature of the Church. Paul gropes for other metaphors. He
speaks about the garden, he speaks about the house, he speaks about the temple. The
diversity of theologies are not like philosophical schools arguing with one another; that"s
a fleshly way of thinkingor, as we would say, it is a secularized way of thinking about
religious diversity (1 Cor. 3).
Matters of religion do not represent a zero-sum problem. That"s Paul"s message. It is not
a zero-sum proposition where adding to the other means deducting from the one. That"s his
vision, and I think, it is valid and important for us as another way of thinking about
religious coexistence. Of course, people who speak like me are accused of, "So anything
goes, eh?" No. Paul certainly knows he was right. "I know that I am right but I am
not thereby justified, it is God who judges" ( I Cor. 4:4). So he is not backing down
from his conviction. But since religion has to do with God, any doctrinal insight expressed
by the human mind and grasped by a human will cannot claim ultimacy. Anything goes? No.
Let"s argue. I"ve just read a brilliant book review by Jon D. Levenson in Journal of
Religion 71 (1991), 558-67. He is writing about a book by David Novak on
Jewish-Christian dialogue. He is saying that if anyone in dialogue has to presuppose that
you are not allowed to witness to your conviction, then it is better just to go with
Soleveitchik"s position that we should discuss only matters of common interest and not
theology. Now Levenson doesn"t quite say that it has to be so, but he is sort of teasing
Novak for making it too easy to say that somehow you bracket your convictions when you enter
into dialogue. That"s a caricature of dialogue. For dialogue slowly creates a climate in
which you can both speak and listen and find out what the real issue is. And ultimately
perhaps reach what I love to speak about, but will not speak about tonightthe Holy Envy:
when we recognize something in another tradition that is beautiful but is not in ours, nor
should we grab it or claim it. We Americans in our imperialism think that if we like
something we just incorporate it and we think that we honour others by doing so. But that is
not the way.Holy envy rejoices in the beauty of the others.
To me "the Corinthian model" is the solution. Another point I have borrowed
from Levenson is that if one wants to move toward dialogue, one has to give reasons for
breaking with the tradition. For it is obvious that the Christian tradition, in general, in
relation to other religions has not been dialogical. Sometimes it has been more dialogical
on the mission station than we have been given to believe, as Kenneth Cracknell of Wesley
House in Cambridge has always pointed out. If you read the diaries of the missionaries, you
see how much there is of "presence" and "dialogue," but when they wrote
home often the jargon of the home office won out. Levenson says that Novak has not
demonstrated that dialogue is so essential that it justifies changes of that magnitude;
namely, bracketing both, the witness and the critique of one another.
I happen to think that dialogue is essential in a world where religion is often part of
the problem rather than part of the solution in the relations between people. It is of much
importance that we make our hermeneutical moves honestly and openly. I have lifted up Paul"s
warning in Romans 11 and Paul"s idea in First Corinthians of a coexistence which is not a
zero-sum order that to him is totally secular. Actually, in both cases he is referring to
something which is different because it has to do with God and not with philosophy, not with
defined thinking systems, for any thinking system which claims ultimacy is a form of
idolatry. "I think I am right but I am not thereby justified" is Paul"s wonderful
safeguard.
The first model deals with Jewish-Christian relations and the second model deals with
intra-Christian relations, based on the fact that Christ is the foundation on which the
house is being built. I would like to suggest a modern typology in which one says that these
spiritual models of attitudes, these awarenesses of the fact that under God we are not
locked in a zero-sum society, can be extended, and that we have valid reasons to extend both
the Jewish-Christian and the intra-Christian model of Paul"s toward interreligious attitudes
in general. We are thereby making a deliberate move; we are not smuggling it in, we should
know what we are doing. But I want to do it openly and give the reason for it as a valid way
of utilizing the model.
The book by David Novak which Levenson critiques strikes me as unattractive in one way
because it really sees the task of Jewish-Christian dialogue as one of banding together in
an alliance against all the others and I don"t think that we are much helped in this world,
in which we are all minorities from God"s perspective, by alliances among sub-groups. This
doesn"t seem to be what the situation calls for. But as has often happened in Christian
history, coming back to my beloved image of the laboratory, I would say that somehow when we
Christians have found a model which works for us, it might be ready for export, to try these
things out.
Now my final point is this. It is a well-known one and I don"t know why it has dawned on
me so slowly. I have referred to texts. These are our texts. Each minority has its texts;
what its history has recorded, what God has recorded in the hearts of the people. Their
writing is shaped by their experiences.
These are our texts. Out of our perspectives we interpret them. When a child is bornI
guess women can talk better about thisbut I would guess that the child"s, the baby"s,
world does not consist of much more than itself and the mother"s breast. That"s the whole
world and one of the things that happens as we grow up is that it dawns upon us that other
children have sucked other breasts. The process of sorting out such facts is called
maturation. That"s what maturation is. Now one of the most intriguing texts on the universal
and the particular that I know of in my beloved Bible is the passage in First Corinthians
15. (This is just an attempt to help those who love the Bible to think about these things,
although others are allowed to listen in!) Let me tell it in the form of a Jewish-style
midrash.
It is the day of consummation and the whole world is gathered and there we are, we
Christians. Now as we look up there is God and Christ on God"s right hand exactly as we have
been told. So we turn around and see that there are also all the others. We see a sort of
pan-religious and ecumenical representation and we turn around with a Christian smile which
says: "You see, it is just as we said and isn"t it wonderful that our God is so
generous that you can all be here!" When we turn back towards God there is no Christ to
be seen on God"s right side because Christ will never be present to feed into the smugness
of his believers; or, as the text says: "And so when the end comes, Christ will lay it
all down before the Father and God will become panta en pasin, all in all." That
is another way of witnessing to the mystery — lest I be conceited.
This article is based on a lecture Prof. Krister Stendahl delivered at the Center for
the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, as edited by Arvind Sharma and Jennifer
Baichwal for Journal of Religious Pluralism 2, 1993. With kind permission of the
author.![]("../img/common/arrow-up.gif") |
