The importance of Interfaith Dialogue for Evangelicals
The following excerpt is taken from pgs. 111-121 of former Fuller President Richard Mouw’s Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World. To purchase the entire book, click here.
We Christians seem to be fond of polarizations. This propensity shows up in discussions about our approach to other religions. Some Christians emphasize evangelizing strategies that are heavily weighted toward explicit convictedness: present the message of the gospel and invite people to become Christians. Other Christians rely heavily on civility: engage in polite dialogue with people from other religious communities in the hope of promoting mutual understanding and cooperation.
The defenders of each of these approaches often don’t get along very well. The evangelizers accuse the dialoguers of sacrificing the gospel for religious relativism; they fear that the unique claims of Christianity will be bartered away in inter-religious dialogue. The dialoguers respond by accusing the evangelizers of a religious imperialism that runs roughshod over the genuine insights that can be found in other religious traditions; they want to avoid a dogmatic spirit.
Do these two approaches need to be treated as an either-or choice? Is it possible to see evangelism and dialogue as complementary activities? I’m inclined to look for some way of integrating the two emphases. Why can’t Christians engage in evangelization while at the same time hoping to gain new understanding through dialogue with other religions?
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When evangelism and dialogue become the watchwords of two opposing camps, it leaves some of us very uncomfortable. For example, I find that the dialoguers often explain their approach in ways that leave me no choice but to stay out of their camp. Theologians representing the dialogue cause often do sound relativistic; some of them even insist that interreligious dialogue is an important phase in our “evolution” toward a new “global theology” to which various religions will contribute their particular “hypotheses” about ultimate reality.
I cannot accept a call to interreligious dialogue that rejects Christianity’s claims to uniqueness. And, frankly, I know Jews and Muslims who would also reject that approach. They do not want their claims to theological uniqueness reduced to mere “hypotheses” about spiritual things. There are genuine disagreements between the different religions. In the final analysis, the choice between religious perspectives has to do with mutually exclusive truth claims about reality and goodness. No amount of dialogue will make these differences go away.
But this does not mean that I’m a consistently comfortable resident of the evangelizing camp. My fellow evangelizers do sometimes (and I stress the sometimes) tend toward dogmatism and imperialism—especially in reaction to the relativistic statements of many dialoguers. But that does not mean they’re right in rejecting dialogue altogether.
I want an evangelizing Christianity that is open to civil dialogue with non-Christians. So I look for ways of transcending these polarized positions. There is much to be gained from holding firmly to Christian truth claims while genuinely engaging other people in serious discussion.
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It is important, I think, to value both evangelism and dialogue without reducing the one to the other. The two activities have a complementary relationship.
Indeed, dialogue can be an important strategy for evangelism—a fact that’s been recognized by evangelicals who call for “relational evangelism.” In many situations, the best way to evangelize people is to establish strong bonding relationships with them: listening to them, identifying with their hopes and fears, gaining their trust. Then, when we do have the chance to talk with them about the gospel, they can accept our words as an expression of love for them. The empathic give-and-take of this approach is essentially dialogic in nature.
That is good and noble. But it’s important that all dialogue with persons of other religious groups not be merely a strategy for evangelism. We mustn’t set these relationships up in such a way that our efforts will be a failure if the relationships don’t develop into evangelistic opportunities.
Francis Schaeffer, a Christian leader who did much to foster the idea of a more intellectually reflective evangelicalism, talked often about the importance of “co-belligerency.” By that he meant that we should find ways of cooperating with people of other faith perspectives in working for the common good. This would mean, he insisted, we would form ad hoc alliances—working with one group on this cause and with another on a different cause. Interreligious understanding is a helpful means to gain the appropriate information and sensitivities to seek out that kind of cooperation.
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I once heard an African Christian leader tell what it had been like for him to turn away from animistic religion to embrace Christ. “There were many things in my tribe’s religious stories that prepared me for the gospel. When I first heard the story of Jesus, it did not strike me as a completely new and strange thing. What I said to myself was, ‘Aha! So that is the answer!’”
This man first experienced Christ as the answer to questions that he had long been asking from within the framework of another religion. This should not surprise us. St. Augustine’s oft-quoted prayer expresses a profound fact about the human condition: our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The spiritual restlessness that characterizes the human quest can find fulfillment only in Christ. Interreligious dialogue can be an important way for us to understand better the ways in which our human restlessness is expressed in different religious settings.