What are the positives and negatives of interfaith dialogue? What is the place of religious conversion in the dialogical process?
Introduction
Interreligious dialogue, also referred to as interfaith dialogue, is about people of different faiths coming to a mutual understanding and respect that allows them to live and cooperate with each other in spite of their differences. The term refers to cooperative and positive interaction between people of different religious traditions, (i.e. "faiths") at both the individual and institutional level. Each party remains true to their own beliefs while respecting the right of the other to practise their faith freely. There are religious people who take the idea of interfaith dialogue quite antagonistically and inimically, as something against their dogmas, while, there are others who take it as something that bridges two faith in the bound of relationship though educative and relative form of discussion. To look at the idea more broadly this paper work attempts to study the concepts of interfaith dialogue and highlight its positives and negatives in present India context with regard to religious conversion.
Defining Interfaith Dialogue
Dialogue has been variously defined, understood and perceived both in the context of intra-Christian as well as interreligious engagement. In its broadest and deepest sense, dialogue in the intra-Christian context means moving beyond division toward full visible communion and common witness and service in charity and with humility. By comparison, in the interreligious context dialogue has often been expansively understood beyond formal institutionalized conversations. The traditional four-fold model of interreligious dialogue speaks of the dialogue of life, dialogue of action, dialogue of theological exchange and the dialogue of religious experience (Dialogue and Proclamation). Dialogue means positive and constructive inter-religious relations with individuals and communities of other faiths, directed to mutual understanding and enrichment, in obedience to truth, with respect for freedom. Dialogue is understood as shared communication for mutual understanding, to address divisions or conflicts, or to nurture solidarity for peace and justice or mutual empowerment.
Aims of Dialogue:
Dialogue seeks to:
Increase mutual understanding and good relations.
Identify causes of tension in religious relations. These are often economic, social or political rather than religious.
Build understanding and confidence to overcome or prevent tensions.
Break down the barriers and stereotypes which lead to distrust, suspicion and bigotry.
Interfaith Dialogue is not:
About talking away or brushing aside differences. It does not aim at coming to a common belief.
A way of converting the other. In dialogue each party remains true to their own faith.
A space for arguing, attacking or disproving the beliefs of the other. It is about increasing mutual understanding and trust.
The Two Basic Benefits of Dialogue: Educational and Relational
I have serious doubts about interfaith dialogue's usefulness. In fact, I think most interfaith events are only slightly effective at best in achieving their quantified goals of constructing bridges between people of different faiths. I've come to think that the two best achievements for interfaith initiatives are educational and relational.
Educationally speaking, people in India are mostly illiterate when it comes to religions other than their own. And many don't even know their own religions very well, at least from anything other than a innocently devotional perspective. Good interfaith events can provide trustworthy information about different religions and the people who practice them. I support any initiative that offers genuine facts and information about religions and their adherents, rather than the lies and stereotypes that usually pass for truths.
Relationally speaking, good interfaith events enable friendships between people of all faiths. This is significant because any community – a city, town, county, whatever – is dependent for its strength on the interpersonal relationships between its various members and groups. Those relational ties get seasoned during times of disaster, i.e. natural tragedies, socio-political turbulences, etc. which then picture the erroneous lines of a community.
The Challenges in Interfaith Dialogue
The first challenge is a lack of objectives. For any interfaith dialogue to thrive, all parties must be clear on the conversation's objectives. This can benefit people choose which conversations they should join. For instance, if the goal is to discuss complex theological subjects, it is essential to include scripture experts, historians, linguists, and other academics. Amateur people and usually younger people may not feel comfortable in these conferences. On the other hand, conversations absorbed around personal values and experiences would be more attractive to people who do not fit into a defined faith or spiritual category (e.g. agnostics or atheists) or people who are less involved in theology. Academics who want to debate religious details would perhaps shy away from these dialogues. Thus, it is essential to hold manifold different types of dialogs, each geared to a diverse audience.
The second challenge is when people feel that they need to compromise their religious self in order to fit in. This often happens when dialogue members come across an indeterminable dissimilarity. Ideally, interfaith dialogue is thought to help each partaker better comprehend their own religion and ascertain the areas in which their religion is unique or not. In the condition defined, both parties should agree to disagree. They should admit that differences exist and seek to understand them without compromising their own beliefs. The third challenge is proselytizing. This is also antithetical to the idea of respecting each other's differences. It is perfectly acceptable for dialogue participants to claim that they have the absolute truth. However, in interfaith dialogue, participants should enter the conversation in order to learn about other religions' beliefs, not to promote their own. Such are the challenges of the interfaith dialogues.
Conversion: The Negatives of Inter Faith Dialogue
From the point of view of inter faith relations, the question of conversion from one religion to another between faiths is a very problematic matter to handle. Indeed, much inter faith dialogue seems mainly to evade the question in two ways: by not giving it as a considerable theme for discussion, and by not including within the discussion spheres those who have experienced interreligious conversions in their own lives. Michael Ipgrave outlined four kinds of problem which conversions raise for inter faith relations – respectively: political, social, dialogical, and identity (religious).
Political
There are numerous inter-faith settings where conversion is particularly a quarrelsome subject because of its wider perceived implications, which could be described as 'political' in the wider sense of the term. An obvious example is Christian-Hindu relations, which through history have repeatedly been marked by forceful attempts (as Hindus claim, either by money or power) to make Hindu people into Christians. Some of these have been the outcome of missionary endeavours to bring salvation to the Hindus. Others have been the alternative to exclusion presented by coercive governments wishing to bring religious uniformity to their people. In either case, though, they have been experienced by the Hindu community as considered efforts to abolish Hindu peoplehood. In any case, what is clear here is the degree to which questions of conversion directly comprise political considerations for Hindu. Naturally, when these questions are raised within an inter faith context, the practical import of Hindu law on converts to Christianity or other faiths will also be a concern. Another instance of the political resonances of conversions can be found in recent discussions about the missionary and social work of the churches in India. While Christians have tended to see the issues here in terms of minority freedom and repression in a society where traditional religion is used to support an unequal and unjust social order, the proponents of Hindutva resurgence have represented Christianity as engaged in an assault on the Hindu culture which they see as constituting the essence of Indian nationhood. In more detail, there are bitter disputes about the alleged abuse of social welfare schemes by mission agencies as attempts to lure people into Christian faith through offers of education, medical care, and so on, with the implication that the status of the converts is not that of those who have come to a genuinely free decision Therefore their decision to convert is not respected, or even not recognised.
Social
These Hindu objections leads to second area where conversion is seen to be problematic for inter faith relationships – namely, in its effects on the social rationality of organised communities of faith. In particular, conversion is perceived to be a direct menace to the harmony and permanency of the family in its role as medium and guarantor of religious adherence. Perhaps the most debateable is that of inter faith marriages. Many individual conversions happen when one marriage partner accepts the faith of the other; even when both spouses try to preserve their own faith, there can be a notable degree of distancing from either or both of the original communities. A (literally) final point at which the likelihood of conversion may be seen as intensely menacing is in relation to death and funereal customs. Equally, there may many other such issues.
Dialogical
The third difficult area relates explicitly to that method of inter faith relations which can be labelled as inter faith dialogue– that is to say, circumstances where people of diverse faiths involve in conversation with the goals of understanding one another better and seeking the truth together. Such situations are always more or less flimsy, and highly sensitive to nuances in mutual awareness. In a dialogue, the personal attendance of converts from one faith to another can prove intensely disturbing for many members. Let me reference two different types of approach to dialogue which can be sternly challenged by converts.
One is the attitude which in its popular mode relies on such analogies as 'many paths all leading to the peak of the same mountain', and in its sophisticated theological expression matter in the pluralism of a John Hick or a Paul Knitter. The central datum of this method is the idea of 'rough parity': that 'salvation' more or less equally, if differently, available in the various faiths. In short, converts seem to be a skandalon (stumbling block) in dialogue, challenging equally the religions' claims to finality, to self-sufficiency and to parity; conversion is a destabilising factor for dialogue.
Identity
At a still deeper level, the sense of frustration, bewilderment or even anger which the presence of the convert presents can reach beyond the immediate context of inter faith dialogue to place a question mark against the religious identity of everybody in a multi-faith situation. Identity is an extremely indefinable notion; possibly it is most obviously recognised when it is most felt to be under threat, and most explicitly relied upon in times of hasty social alteration. Britain, like other western European countries, is in just such a time, as our society has moved in less than a generation from relative homogeneity to a startling diversity, at least in urban zones. Over the last thirty years, the language and concepts which have been used to express individual and corporate identities in this quickly altering state have themselves changed – immigrant status, colour, race or ethnicity, and culture have consecutively been the focus of attention. To this complex scene the last few years have added a growing recognition of the importance of religion as a constitutive element of identity.
In most respects, this developing recognition of the importance of faith as a key element defining who people are is very welcome, and indeed long Overdue. As several critics pointed out during parliamentary discussion of the religious hatred bill, the 'givenness' and invariance of ethnicity cannot simply be transmitted to religion. So there is a cluster of inter-related issues, operating at various levels, which make the conversion issue a very hard one to handle within the inter faith context.
And most of we time we are content with stating a few noble, often-repeated sentiments. Thus, we assert the significance of mutual understanding, tolerance and dialogue; we assert that all human beings are created in the image of God; we declare that despite our differences, all of our traditions preach love of humankind and service to humanity. Nothing is wrong with these feelings, of course; in conceptual terms, I believe in them all. But if we don't dig beneath the shallow statements and focus on substance rather than rhetoric, they mean very little. The result is that most of the time, interfaith discussions are simply excruciating, unrelated to me and to the world around me.
Conclusion
Christians have sometimes considered of mission and evangelism in monological terms; we bring to others what is missing. Especially when religion is involved, the others, as Muslim or Hindu, either have nothing to offer or what is offered is regarded with disbelief. We thus close ourselves to the other. Such interaction, dialogues, however, fails to understand God's continual movement towards us in address and response. The other already stands in some relation to God. We do not know what "yesses" have already been said in response to God's address. For a missionary to say, 'I have converted so many hundred people' is bad for the missionary's spiritual egotism, and it is menacing to the unconverted neighbours of those hundreds. We need to purify our language at this point, to make it clear that – in Christian terms – it is only ever the Holy Spirit who is the genuine agent of conversion, operating in the intimacy of the other's personal autonomy which nobody else has the right to violate. Conversion should not be abandoned as a goal of dialogue, nor should we lose the sense of urgency of mission, but conversion must be placed within a proper dialogical and relational context. Conversion is a relationally restorative process that it occurs as a result of relation; relation is both instrument and result. If conversion is understood in its deepest relational sense, it is not about "winning" someone to Christ. Rather Conversion is a relational process that leads to salvation, the final relationally restorative event of reconciliation with God and others. In the now of dialogical relation, we expect the eschatological relational vision of Revelation 21–22. This is a process of becoming in which each encounter carries within it the probability for mutual transformation and discovery. Conversion, understood in this relational sense, is a proper goal of dialogue.
ENDNOTES:
(n.a.) "Called to Dialogue: Interreligious and Intra-Christian in Ecumenical Conversation", A Practical Guide, World Council Churches, WCC Publication, Geneva, 2016, 6.
David N. Lorenzen, A Dialogue between a Christian & a Hindu about Religion (Mexico: Colegio Press, 2015), 38.
Ibid, 7
Menandro Sarion Abanes, Ethno-religious Identification and Intergroup Contact Avoidance (Berlin: Verlag Press, 2014), 3.
David Tracy, Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-religious Dialogue (Louvian: Eerdmans Press, 1990), 27.
Dirk Dunbar, Renewing the Balance (USA: Outskirs Press, 2017), 199.
Michael Ipgrave, "The Society for Ecumenical Studies Reflections On Conversion In Inter-Faith Contexts" Societas Oecumenica, Salisbury, 24th August 2002.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Abanes, Menandro Sarion. Ethno-religious Identification and Intergroup Contact Avoidance Berlin: Verlag Press, 2014.
Dunbar, Dirk. Renewing the Balance. USA: Outskirs Press, 2017.
Ipgrave, Michael. "The Society for Ecumenical Studies Reflections On Conversion In Inter-Faith Contexts" Societas Oecumenica, Salisbury, 24th August 2002.
Lorenzen, David N. A Dialogue between a Christian & a Hindu about Religion. Mexico: Colegio Press, 2015.
(n.a.) "Called to Dialogue: Interreligious and Intra-Christian in Ecumenical Conversation", A Practical Guide, World Council Churches, WCC Publication, Geneva, 2016.
Tracy, David. Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-religious Dialogue. Louvian: Eerdmans Press, 1990.
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