Between Mission and Dialogue:
A Pluralist Arbitration in Christian Perspective

Alan Race
Interreligious Insight, UK

I have long observed that the ethical trajectories of the religions seem to have such a strong resonance with each other – sufficient, at any rate, for them to share in the common cause of solidarity for the sake of greater justice and more lasting peace in the world – while the philosophical and theological thrust of the traditions act in the polar opposite manner to force them apart. And that force all too easily erupts into violence, as we witness historically and in our present unstable world circumstances. This tension means that the ground for interreligious work is like shifting sand, and we find ourselves endlessly negotiating the terms of our relationships.

Let me give you a simple example of this dilemma. A number of years ago the Parliament of the World’s Religions heralded their now well-known Initial Declaration Towards a Global Ethic. It was not a perfect document but it was a clear and creative signal that the religions need to think beyond their old isolated ways. There is a route out of the historical determinism that has locked us into incommensurable spaces. The religions shared, it was said, some fundamental values and they could join together in four common commitments: a) to respect for life (for me – the basis of a critique of the militarization of politics); b) to a just economic order (for me – the basis for a critique of wealth creation without compassion); c) to a life of tolerance and truthfulness (for me – the basis of a critique of monocultural thinking); d) to a partnership between men and women ( (for me – the basis for a critique of the failure to value the diversity of human beings in terms of their gender, sexual orientation and perhaps their sheer capacity to form relationships). So here was work to do and it united the religions in common cause.

But no sooner was the ink dry on the page than the commentators weighed in with their accusations that such a tentative Global Ethic represented the worst case of syncretism or homogenising between religions and spiritual movements. The religions might look as though they share common ethical language but that language is so embodied in different histories and cultural forms that it is more of a mirage than a real oasis in the desert of global problems. Buddhist compassion is not the same as Christian love or Muslim service of the world. We distort the realities of religious seriousness, of the vision of ‘transcendent glimpsing and human transformation’ within the religions, if we conflate our differences after the manner of the Global Ethic.

So we have the horns of our dilemma. Ethics invites us to open our doors to the religious other, but philosophy and theology push us apart again.

Is it possible to solve this dilemma? Some say that it is not possible. But it does seem to me that without some attention being given to these theoretical issues we will just keep bumping into religious caution in these areas and lose the opportunities for creative imagining. In other words, if globalisation is to work for the common good then continually seeking to refine the theoretical problems needs more attention from the religions than simply the cautious permission to be involved, good and necessary as that is.

This dilemma of solidarity among religions in common cause versus their incommensurable separation is sometimes portrayed as a dilemma between Mission and Dialogue. The question for the interreligious movement is how to find the balance between these two sides of the polarity.

First, some definition of terms. Mission is the momentum behind the apprehension that something has been disclosed which depicts something of the nature of reality itself and which therefore should not remain the possession of one human group alone. If the disclosure is of the truth then human beings are diminished for not hearing of it. This will be true irrespective of whether or not a particular tradition has promoted itself as a so-called ‘missionary religion’ throughout history. Dialogue signals the momentum behind the apprehension that no matter what has been disclosed through a religious matrix it remains always partial, and therefore there is an expectation that the partial may be open to complementarity with others.

In the negotiation between Mission and Dialogue I suggest there are two moves to make:

1. We dispel the conceptual caricatures by recognising that both Mission and Dialogue have been changing their shape in recent years;

2. We develop a theology of religions as a mediation between the potentially competing interests of Mission and Dialogue.

How has the idea of Mission has been developing?

I was born in an area of the UK not many miles from the place where Captain James Cook was born. This is my connection with these islands of Hawai’i! James Cook was the first European to land here on 20 January 1778. He was treated with great reverence by the locals. However, he also suffered his fate when he was killed during an altercation over some stolen small boats. Well, on the hills near to Cook’s birthplace there is a monument to him in the shape of an obelisk. The obelisk was erected in 19^th century and part of the plaque of commemoration reads as follows:

Spreading civilisation and the blessings of Christian faith – a double edge to a once highly regarded and standard view of Christian Mission – is a view to which no-one now would subscribe. It smacks today of incipient violence and racism, no matter how personally noble in character James Cook might have been.

But we do have to say now that Mission has been redefined in mainstream Christian circles. No longer dominantly bestowing advantages from a platform of superiority to one of inferiority, the goal of Mission is, in words of the WCC, ‘a reconciled and renewed creation’ – and what could be better than that? It covers sustainability, justice and peace, interreligious dialogue. Part of the thrust of this view would still be that there is a story to tell about the place and presence of the central figure of Jesus and his impact in the world – the vision of the sovereignty of God’s rule of justice and compassion that stems from him – but it is a story to be told in terms of what enhances human and planetary flourishing rather than as an ideological indicator granting membership to the redeemed club of believers. Consider, for example, this quotation from the celebrated doyen historian of religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith

What now of the changing face of Dialogue? This is easier to outline, for Dialogue in the terms in which it is now practised is relatively recent. Perhaps the caricature of Dialogue is the assumption that partners in conversation are really reiterating the same things if only they could own up to the fact. To be sure, they use different thought-forms and conceptual frameworks, but underneath the outward clothing they really are in essence the same. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

Perhaps the real problematic about Dialogue is fear of it. Let me illustrate the instability and suspicion about Dialogue with reference to the Catholic Church. In 1998 the Vatican summoned the Asian Catholic bishops to Rome because the authorities had heard that the Asian bishops might be taking this business of dialogue a bit too far. Sure, the theologians of the church had pronounced through the encyclical Dialogue and Proclamation (1991) that the religions of the world play "a providential role in the divine economy of salvation" but they were also clear that that providential role was subordinate to Christian proclamation. The Asian bishops, on the other hand, were promoting the view that dialogue is not an option but it partly defines the context of multiple religions and pervasive poverty in Asia. Subordinating it to proclamation would be tantamount to ignoring the realities of their daily lives. The Sri Lankan bishops, for example, talked of the ‘necessity of a missionary spirituality of dialogue’. Is this clever spin-doctoring? Probably not, and the bishops had no intention of being other than orthodox. The liberation thrust of Asian Christian thought is orthodox through and through, in spite of what commentators try to find. Still, the central institutional response of the Catholic Church remained unimpressed.

But what if the church authorities had intuited a slippery slope here? For Dialogue, if I observe correctly, has been creating a site of mutuality and accountability between religions, and this cuts across the sense that the absoluteness of religious truth resides within one camp alone; or, if that is too stark a way of putting it, one camp simply has a greater depth of religious truth than the others.

However, all the talk of the principles guiding Dialogue point in this direction of mutuality. So:

Each partner needs the other to come to a better understanding of religious truth.

In other words, Dialogue has been creating a climate that supersedes the original theological permission for it that we gave ourselves a generation ago. Dialogue is more than a process but becomes the framework for exploring religious truth itself across boundaries. Dialogue becomes more than a process of exchange – but an orientation on ultimate reality which, having been rendered "de-absolute" under pressures of critical thinking, exceeds all manifestations of that reality.

Some dialogue theologians at this point appeal to a mystical sense of pathless, ineffable wonder at the heart of reality, in a bid to avoid having to navigate the seeming competitiveness inherent in separate pathways. ‘Ineffability’ moves us beyond a single path, the mission path of a tradition, if you will. But ineffability does not replace the various paths. So mystics walk along a path, even if they eventually say that the path, like the Buddha’s raft once the river has been crossed, is to be left behind when ultimate truth is encountered. But then we are left with the question of the relation between pathlessness and the paths of specific traditions. Dialogue might rejoice in ineffability but it can only do so, paradoxically, by acknowledging the provisional necessity of the different paths themselves.

So between Mission and Dialogue – between telling and listening, giving and receiving, bestowing and sharing – there are remainders of mutual suspicion. No-one spreads a religion by Dialogue alone. And yet neither does any responsible theologian these days wants to live by Mission alone.

But given these observations about the changing contours of Mission and Dialogue, what is the theological task? I suggest that it is to articulate the authenticity of difference between the religions together with their belongingness to one another as part of a greater notion of truth. That’s a tough call, but I believe that it is possible to articulate a way forward. The Indian theologian, Stanley Samartha, once said something helpful here:

(Stanley Samartha, One Christ- Many Religions (1991) )

What is needed in these circumstances is a theological mediator between the 2 camps.

The theology of religions seeks to interpret the meaning of religious plurality in the light of what we know of other traditions, our experience of their impact (their goodness and their negative effects), and the role of critical reasoning (the recognition of the role of history and culture in formulating religious beliefs, spiritualities and ethical postures, and so on). It notes that a religious account of transcendent vision and human transformation is glimpsed through a particular concrete focus. That concrete focus might be a scripture, a person, an appreciation of the natural world. In other words, the religions are rooted in concrete experience (particular) but are expansive in their intention and effects (universal). This is a dynamic which is both a source of glory and of anxiety - glory in that the experience of ultimate reality that has been glimpsed through a particular means is in fact beyond localization, and it thus inspires Mission; but anxiety in that if there are others who similarly glimpse ultimate reality, yet are phenomenologically different from oneself, then what is ‘God’ (to speak theistically) up to? Such differences may be not only a source of anxiety, but also of suspicion and, as we know all too often, even conflict.

The theology of religions interprets this structure of particularity and universal relevance among the religions in different ways. Here are three possibilities:

So how do these 3 positions relate to the tension between Mission and Dialogue? All three positions here accept a role for Mission – all 3 accept that there is a Christian story to relate, whether that’s for conversion, or for edification that something greater is available that what they have known thus far, or simply for the sake of sharing and learning from the differences.

But how do the 3 positions deal with the new information from Dialogue?

Attitude (a) has difficulties. If your theology leads you to expect benightedness (at worst ) or a vagueness of spirituality (at best) elsewhere you are often embroiled in a serious misrepresentation of others. So for example, Hendrik Kraemer, one of the major architects of the Christian response to Islam in the middle of the last century, and who stressed discontinuity between Christian faith and other religions, once said of Islam that "in its constitutive elements and apprehensions [it] must be called a superficial religion … Islam might be called a religion that has almost no questions and no answers." This is an astonishing statement from a scholar of Islam! It is no wonder that many Muslims (and others) have wondered about the validity of the dialogical invitation. Where is the mutual respect?

The most common position in Christian circles is attitude (b). God is everywhere but our glimpsing of God can only be measured by the Christian theological and conceptual framework. But the difficulties with this are well-known. How can Jesus initiate the salvation of the Buddhist or the Hindu, both of whom belong to traditions that are older than the appearance of Jesus on earth? And both have generated equally impressive results in terms of ethics and civilisation. What does it mean for the incarnate Word or the resurrected Christ or the Spirit of God – choose your Christian formulation of words – to be operative in the world as the decisive focus for the spiritual vitality of others? Theologians who realise this problem seek to ameliorate the effects of this approach by pushing the problem to the end of life, i.e. after death, there will be a post-mortem encounter with Christ for other believers. However, this does nothing to answer the central problem. The encounter with Christ as necessity is retained; only the manner and moment of encounter is changed.

The dilemma is marvellously illustrated by a question once asked by Cardinal Ratzinger in a major Vatican document in the late 1990s. He said: "How can one enter into interreligious dialogue, respecting all religions and not considering them in advance as imperfect and inferior, if we recognise in Jesus Christ and only in him the unique and universal Saviour of mankind?" This challenge remains unanswered in official ecclesiastical theology and also much academic theology. I might also add that as a matter of observation, at least the Christian articulation of the problem is out in the open; I have not observed it so much in other traditions as yet.

The third view (c) takes the point about ineffable mystery as the heart of reality with fullest seriousness. It notes that all traditions make some distinction between ultimate reality as known in concrete particular ways and ultimate reality as being beyond the possibility of being fully known (ineffable). In the final analysis, all traditions are rafts, a means to an end, and they conceptualise these means and ends according to the best conceptual lights they have. But all lights are limited – pointers, metaphors and symbolic representations – and this is because religious language depicts but does not reproduce the ultimate truth of our condition and the meaning of life. The infinity of ultimate reality is the deeper ineffable ground of the many phenomenal manifestations of religious insight and truth. An empirical justification for hypothesising this is that the traditions show themselves to be comparable at the empirical level – producers of both good and bad in spiritual insight and practice. No one tradition has been greater than another in history. It is important to stress that, on this view, radical differences are retained, for the religions are historically specific in so many ways, but their mutual belongingness in transcendence is also affirmed.

Some have objected to this outlook in so far as it seems to arrive at a tidy conclusion too quickly. Religions, they aver, have different aims, different expected outcomes: as I said earlier, they would say that Christian love is not the same as Buddhist compassion, and so on. We cannot therefore assume that we are all united, even in the realms of ineffable ultimate reality. There are just differences; we can respect one another, we can encounter without assuming superiority, we might even perceive something in the other that enriches our own outlook and which has emerged more fully in another tradition than our own. But don’t assume we all meet somewhere, even if that somewhere is mystical.

My own reaction to this criticism is that it misses the mark. The pluralist view is an inductive view. It notes that our own Christian faith is based on experience that we believe can be trusted, and this basis can be extended to others also. At this point you then have to make sense of the manyness of religious life theologically. Emphasising the radical differences is fine. But that does not prevent us making the inductive move that as Christian faith is not a projection but a trust of experience and a cognitive response to what we call the divine reality, and that this is partially confirmed by its spiritual fruits, so we can say the same is true for others. This leaves us with a problem. How to explain the diversity of religious life, assuming that the religious life it is a valid life based on a varied sense of transcendence and with equal impressiveness and equal unimpressiveness among the religions? How to allow for radical differences and yet relatedness that is practised in dialogue, honouring the assumptions, impact and discoveries of dialogue itself? Simply to say we are all different and that’s that seems insufficient in the face of the evidence and the practice. Theology has to catch up with the practice.

In recent years, the pressure from so-called postmodernism is towards acceptance of radical differences between traditions, with the implication that the whole attempt to establish any theology of religions is bound to be misconceived. Yet if this critique is accepted, what then is the status of ultimate reality? Is it single or multiple? All traditions assume singularity at this point, which is why the problem of plurality arises in the first instance. The prospect of multiple ultimates just seems deeply unattractive even if sense can be made of it. To postulate many ultimates is simply to restate the problem of plurality itself. Further, if there is a family resemblance between the religions – and many think there is – then this very family resemblance is something which militates against the total separation between traditions assumed by many versions of postmodernism.

So to return to my original concerns with Mission and Dialogue. My thesis has been that both Mission and Dialogue have had their suspicions of one another but that time has passed. However, the overtures that the one makes to the other requires grounding in a theology of religions that enables the relationship to flourish. Mission must surrender the corner of the mind that assumes that one religion alone is eventually superior in terms of experience, insight and ethics. Dialogue must renounce the notion that all religions are variations on the same theme. Mission supplies religious identity on which Dialogue thrives, and Dialogue becomes the new context within which Mission learns to practise mutuality of respect and the ‘wonder of ineffable reality’. Pluralism in the theology of religions arbitrates between the two. Further, whatever friction remains between Mission and Dialogue could even be turned to theological advantage. Deprived of power, missioners can learn appreciation for other religions and that opens the door to dialogue. Dialoguers, on the other hand, ought to thrive on differences and disagreements and this requires respect for the missionary thrust of religions so long as that is conceived in terms of conveying religious experience and belief through narrative telling from below rather than through uncritical announcements from on high.

The Reverend Dr. Alan Race is Editor-in-Chief of Interreligious Insight and an author in the field of interfaith studies.

Copyright 2006 - Journal of Globalization for the Common Good - www.commongoodjournal.com