1

Ms. for Studies in Interreligious Dialogue
Trends and Conferences in the Field of Interreligious Dialogue
50th Anniversary of the Founding of the World Council of Churches
The year 1998 brings the celebration of the Golden Jubilee of the founding of the World Council of Churches, a significant date and the occasion to look back on the work of the WCC and its undeniable achievements in the field of inner-Christian ecumenism, but also in the field of interreligious dialogue. The sub-unit „Dialogue with People of Living Faiths“ within the WCC had been set up in 1971 with the aim to promote interreligious dialogue, to help the churches to reflect on the theological significance of the other religious traditions, the actual practice of dialogue and its implications for the life and ministry of the Churches, and lastly to be the link of the WCC to international nterreligious bodies and organizations. In January 1992 there was a re-structuring of the till then sub-unit „Dialogue with People of Living Faiths“ to „Office on Inter-Religious Relations“ within the General Secretariate of the WCC. Some areas of the work of the former sub-unit were located in other programme units e.g. interfaith dialogue in unit I „Unity and Renewal“ and the theological reflection on the significance of religions in the unit „Mission, Education and Witness“. It has to be noted that prior to the setting up of a special unit for interreligious dialogue in the WCC, there were the work and conferences of the International Missionary Council, which was later in 1961 at the 3rd Plenary Assembly of the WCC in Delhi integrated into this body. It is remarkable that at the first International Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 a special section was devoted to the „Missionary Message in Relation to Non-Christian Religions“ which came up with conclusions of a surprising openness and respect for the other religious traditions. This positive approach towards non-Christian religions was based on answers received from a questionnaire sent to missionaries in various countries who responded more from their own experiences of the living religious traditions than from their dogmatic theological positions which they had learned from European theologians at home. Their findings were summarized in the general conclusions of the Edinburgh Conference which noted that „practically the universal testimony had been that the true attitude of the Christian missionary towards the non-Christian religions should be one of true understanding, and as far as possible of sympathy“ (cf. K. Cracknell, 5). This positive attitude changed in the following conferences of the IMC in Jerusalem in 1928 and especially in Tambaran in 1938. It was Hendrik Kraemer who under the influence of the dialectical theology of Karl Barth in his work „The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World“ stressed the authority of faith against all human endeavours in the field of religions. Only the Christian message which is based on the self-revelation of Christ the Crucified can lead to full salvation, whereas all other religions are the human endeavour to search for the ultimate, a search which is doomed to fail unless it finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. The strong influence of this theology of religions and the propagation of the so-called „biblical realism“ practically stopped theological reflection for several decades. It was only in the sixties with the repercussions of the renewal movement of Vatican II that we see new theological efforts of understanding the other religions within the work of the WCC. During this period we find many forms of cooperation between sub-unit „Dialogue with People of Living Faiths“ and Catholic organizations like the „Papal Council for Interreligious Dialogue“ and other regional groups like e.g. the „Federation of Asian Bishops’s Conferences“ (FABC). The difference in the theological answers given has to do with the fact that in the case of Edinburgh the answers came from missionaries who had living experience and contact with other religions, whereas the position of H. Kraemer was based on insights of a systematic theology developed in Europe without any contact with the living traditions of any non-Christian religions.
Consensus in the Understanding Justification and the Crisis of Ecumenism
The controversy surrounding the „consensus in the fundamental truths of the doctrine of justification“ between the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican is an indication that there inspite of the alleged agreement there remain serious differences. The declaration by the Vatican that the Catholic Church is not ready to accept the worked-out agreement between the theologians of the Papal Council for the Promotion of Unity among Christians and the Lutheran World Federation without several qualifications has been received with deep disappointment and resentment in ecumenical circles. It does not help very much when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is generally considered to be the moving force behind the restrictive answer of the Vatican, tries to reduce the damage done to the ecumenical process by insisting that after all the Vatican agrees that there is a consensus in the „fundamental truths regarding the doctrine of justification“. In the eyes of most theologians and Church representatives have the additional reservations and their implications the consequence that there will be no real consequences coming from this restricted acknowledgment of a reached consensus which is loaded with so many qualifications. The gist of the criticism of the Vatican consists in the statement that the differences in the doctrine of justification between Catholics and Lutherans are more than simply other forms of expressing the basically same doctrine but are expresssions of a different understanding of this central doctrine of the Christian faith. The other argument is of more weight: The Vatican is questioning the competence of the Lutheran World Federation to make statements about the faith, because it is no more than a federation of churches, and due to the synodal structure of this body lacks the authority to speak on behalf of of the Lutheran Churches. This Vatican observation is a novelty in the ecumenical dialogue and threatens its very foundation. How can the Papal Council for Unity deal with the Lutheran World Federation for many months and only then find out that the partner in the dialogue is really not competent? The Vatican statement is nothing less than a demand that the Lutheran Churches which do not have a hierarchical structure return to the traditional ecclesiological hierarchical understanding of the Roman Catholic Church. That means de facto a „turn“ by Roman authorities to a form of „return-ecumenism“ which belongs to the period before Vatican II. Here we find a fundamental obstacle in the ecumenical encounter on the side of the Roman Catholic Church which is again claiming a unique ecclesiological stance which makes a dialogue on the basis of „par cum pari“ de facto impossible.
The Crisis of Ecumenism and its Implications for Interreligious Dialogue
There is an obvious trend in the ecumenical movement within the Christian churches to turn inwards, to become defensive and to assert old positions on the expense of dealing with problems of today which would call for a common Christian witness and common interreligious cooperation in the form of a „world ethos“ , that is a concerted effort by all religously committed people and institutions to work together in fields like globalisation of the market economy, genetic engineering, ecological catastrophes, defense of human rights, fight against hunger and poverty, the worldwide problem of drugs and many other burning issues of today. There are people and groups working together on these issues and it would be wrong to be overly pessimistic that the institutional concerns of people in the religious institutions are shared by all their constituents in whose name these religious functionaries claim to act. Within the Orthodox Churches there is a strong current which calls for a withdrawal of the Orthodx Churches from the World Council of Churches. This became apparent at the meetings in Thessaloniki and Damascus in April and May of this year which were meant to prepare the agenda of the next Plenary Assembly of the WCC in Harare in December 1998. The Orthodox Churches will still take part in Harare but will do so only with certain restrictions. These include that the Orthodox representatives will not join common prayer and liturgical services and participate only selectively in the other program. The Orthodox Church of Georgia has declared its withdrawal from the WCCin Mai 1997, in other Orthodox Churches like the Bulgarian, the Serbian and Russian Orthodox Churches there are strong groups which ask to leave the WCC. As regards the Serbian Orthodox Church there is the legacy of the war in the former Yugoslavia during which the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate played an ignominous role of defending the war against Muslim as a just war of defense by the Serbian Christians. The ambigous position of the World Council of Churches during this conflict in condemning all violations of human rights on all sides was aimed at preserving the ecumenical relationship with the Serbian Orthodox Church, but did not stop the latter from atacking the „Papist-Protestant Ecumenism with its Pseudo-Church and Pseudo-Christianity“. The criticism of the present positions within the WCC concern the question of ordination of women, the attitude towards homosexuality and not the least the whole area of interreligious dialogue and theology of religions. The Orthodox Churches are critical of the theological position of member Churches within the WCC which in the eyes of theologians from the Orthodox Churches have wrong notions about the theological significance of the other religions and which are engaging in religious syncretism in the guise of interreligious dialogue. The Orthodox theologians were shocked by the liturgy held during the last General Assembly in Canberra in 1991 by the Korean theologian Chung Hyun-Kyung. Her liturgy on the Holy Spirit which she saw operative in other religious traditions was in the eyes of Orthodox theologians nothing but a syncretitistic exercise based on theological insights which these Orthodox theologians can only consider to be heretical.
The implications of the ecumenical crisis among the Christian Churches for the fostering of a spirit of openness for interreligious dialogue are to be seen in the observation that already in the past there is a connection between the ecumenical movement and the readiness of entering into dialogue with the members of other religious traditions. There is a certain mutual interdependence in the sense that Christians entering into dialogue with adherents of other non-Christian religions generally become aware of the many communalities Christians of various denominations are sharing with the result that they are more equipped to see the relatively minor differences among the various Christian Churches when compared with the tenets of other non-Christian religious traditions. Then again the experience of having looked beyond the narrow confines of one’s own limited Christian tradition by entering into an ecumenical exchange between Christians can become a good preparation for entering into a dialogue with people of other faiths. It is in this sense that Protestant theologians speak of the wider ecumenism in reference to interreligious dialogue.
The Pluralist Theology of Religions and the Ratzinger-Hick Controversy
J. Ratzinger considers „the pluralist theology of religions“ which he understands to be leading unavoidably to „relativism“ as the central problem for the faith at the present time. In this context he has named John Hick as the leading exponent of this strand in contemporary theology. According to J. Ratzinger the relativist theories advanced by J. Hick are leading to a purely horizontal understanding of human destiny, leaving aside any transcendental aspects in the search of the human spirit in the encounter with a revealing God. In his response J. Hick shows that this criticism on his position is based on a wrong reading of his original statements by J. Ratzinger. What sounds like one of the old theological cantankerous quarrels among theologians becomes important, because it points to a general reaction among Roman Catholic and other Christian theologians when confronted with the problem of religious pluralism and the theological problems it poses. There is a tendency of having recourse to the old established theological formulas and to react to the new situation by pointing to the answers the first Church Fathers have found in their reactions to Roman-Greek deities and even more appropriate to Greek philosophies of Gnosticism and mystery cults. For Ratzinger to stay with the „faith of the Bible and the Church“ requires to resist the onslaught of relativism which is offered under the sign of encounter of cultures as the real philosophy of humanity. Ratzinger sees the true believers again in the position of being in a kind of no-man’s-land on the cultural level, as was the case for the young Christianity in which „not many were wise according to worldly standards“ (1 Cor 1:26). Therefore, he calls for an effort to penetrate the hidden wisdom contained in the foolishness of the Christian faith. But this is a rather retrospective attitude which does not admit that the present situation of religious pluralism, as it is expressed in the situation of the Asian Christian local Churches in the encounter with the great religions of Asia, constitutes a new situation which asks for new theological answers. In the understanding of Ratzinger there is a strange closeness between Europe’s post-metaphysical philosophy and Asia’s negative theology to be observed in the phenomenon of religious relativism. If this were true, would it really stranger than it must have been when Christian theologians made use of Greek philosophy to express the mysteries of the Christian faith in the first Councils or in the case of St. Thomas Aquinas and Scholastic theologians using the philosophy of Aristotle? Leaving that aside, Ratzinger seems to imply that e.g. Indian theologians are influenced by European and American thought in developing their own Christologies and theology of religions. Obviously that is not doing justice to the new approaches developed by Asian theologians who justly claim that they see themselves in a completely new situation which does not have parallels in church history. A theological reflection on the significance of the great Asian religions in God’s salvific design has never been done before. The year 1998 in which we commemorate the fifth centenary of Vasco da Gama’s coming to India is a good occasion to reflect again on the history of the encounter of Christianity with the religions of Asia. The attempts by Christian missionaries to „overcome“ these religions have failed more or less completely. The Asian religions have resisted these onslaughts, as the percentage of Christians in Asia shows, where Christians are barely 5% of the population. Asian theologians are reflecting on this history and have started to take on the responsibility to find a new Asian way of approaching the problem of lasting religious pluralism. Their new theological stance starts from the assumption that the religious and cultural heritage of Asia is part of their own spiritual heritage. As Christians they experience loyality to the Bible and Christian traditions, whereas as Asian Christians they extend this loyality to include also the religious and cultural traditon of their ancestors. This „double loyality“ enables and obliges the Asian theologians to mark out new paths for Christian theological reflection on the implications of religious pluralism and on the fact that Christianity obviously has to accept the other religions as partners on the way to eschatological fulfillment and to refrain to combat them as opponents which should be overcome or conquered.
Interreligious Dialogue at the Asian Synod in Rome
At the Asian Synod, or as it is formally called „The Special Assembly of the Bishops’ Synod for Asia“ which was held April 16 to May 14 in Rome, the theme of interreligious dialogue was present in many of the contributions made in the aula and in the study circles. In the preparationary paper, the lineamenta, which was prepared in Rome with the assistance of some Asian bishops, the problem of the other Asian religions was treated from the point of view of Jesus Christ being the sole and unique saviour. This theological position of course is stressing the need of evangelisation rather than providing theological insights into the necessity or advisability of interreligious dialogue. The reactions by Asian bishops’ conferences to the preparatory document were in some cases strongly negative. The basic criticism was that this document did not reflect the theological work and insights by the various conferences and study seminars within the FABC during the last 25 years. The whole theological approach was too much European and not enough in tune with the living experiences of the bishops, priests, religious and lay people living in Asian countries where they have the experience of being in dialogue with members of other faiths in various forms and levels. At an international conference organised by the Asian branch of the International Movement of Catholic Intellectuals Pax Romana in Manila in the beginning of March 1998 in preparation for the Asian Synod, the Muslim scholar Ali Aref Nayed voiced his disappointment with the statements regarding dialogue and evangelisation in the Lineamenta. His contribution, coming from a Muslim who has long experience in being in dialogue with Christian theologians in different parts of the world, carries weight, because he signals the dangers for Christian-Muslim dialogue in certain recent Church documents and in particular, in the preparation of the Asian Synod. Within the Muslim world the advocates for dialogue with Christianity are not too many and their liberal position is often attacked by the more fundamentalist groups in Islam. Ali Aref Nayed remarked that while the revised attitude shown by the Catholic Church in the documents of Vatican II towards Islam more than 30 years ago are just beginning to be received by Muslims in different countries, there are at present forces in the Roman Curia which seem to retract much of what has been said in previous documents like Nostra Aetate. The preparatory papers of the Asian Synod with their heavy stress on evangelization and connecting dialogue with proclamation are seen by him as a gradual instrumentalisation of dialogue for the purpose of evangelisation.