Jews, Christians and Muslims in Encounter
Edward Kessler
SCM Press £35
(978-0-334-04715-5)
Church Times Bookshop £31.50 (Use code
CT604 )
Making Sense of Religious Pluralism: Shaping
theology of religions for our times
Alan Race
SPCK £9.99
(978-0-281-06438-0)
Church Times Bookshop £9 (Use code CT604
)
AS A specialist on Islam and Christian-Muslim relations, I came
to these books hoping to learn something from fellow academics or
practitioners working in related but different fields.
Kessler, a Jewish scholar, has worked tirelessly to improve
Jewish-Christian relations, and has made his own scholarly
contribution in uncovering the surprising extent to which Jewish
and Christian medieval biblical exegetes influenced each other - as
exemplified in his articles in this volume on the binding of
Isaac.
Jewish-Christian relations and the ways both traditions have
interpreted the Bible provide the two main organising themes for
this impressive collection. Two have particular contemporary
resonance: one on history and memory in the Israeli conflict, and
the other on how to deal with violent biblical texts. Three essays
also touch on Jewish-Muslim relations, but have the character of
preliminary probes in a new field.
Race's work is a robust but courteously argued apologia
for "religious pluralism" against its rivals - inclusivism and
exclusivism - the position that he pioneered and popularised more
than 30 years ago. In this update, he engages with what is fast
becoming the new consensus, namely, the position that argues that
there is no view from nowhere, and that our access to religious
truth is irreducibly "particular", mediated by distinct religions,
often carriers of incommensurable visions, theologies, and
anthropologies.
Kessler's study is an indispensable guide to the unimaginable
shifts in mutual understanding by Jews and Christians since
Nostra Aetate some fifty years ago. He carefully documents
how the Churches, especially Western Protestant and Roman Catholic
- but not the Orthodox - have distanced themselves from much of the
historic legacy of toxic and degrading interpretations of Judaism,
and what tasks still remain.
Inevitably, Kessler's focus on the West means that little light
is shed on Orthodox Jewish attitudes to Christianity in Israel,
where pre-modern Jewish halachic definitions of Christianity as
"foreign worship" often deemed "idolatrous" persist, and can
justify "distance and disdain" (see Alon Goshen-Gottstein's essay
in Do We Worship the Same God? Jews, Christians and Muslims in
dialogue, edited by Miroslav Volf, Eerdmans, 2012).
One of the most interesting chapters in Race's volume explores
the growing sophistication of, and measure of convergence between,
such categories as "mission" and "interfaith dialogue". For Race,
however, interfaith dialogue should be undergirded by a theology of
religious pluralism which "affirms the other major religions as
valid and equally salvific paths in relation both to ultimate
transcendent reality and to the journey towards mutual critical
acceptance of one another". Needless to say, there is no
exploration in this work of so troubling a phenomenon for such
pluralists as "conversion".
Race's defence of pluralism has little traction in the field of
Christian-Muslim relations. If interfaith dialogue was to be
underwritten by Race's view of pluralism, this would probably
discount the participation of the majority of Muslim scholars. For
example, the Cambridge academic Tim Winter, who often appears on
Radio 4's Thought for the Day as Abdal Hakim Murad,
clearly situates himself at the heart of the Sunni Islamic
tradition when he rehearses the main Muslim attitude to Judaism and
Christianity as supersessionist. With regard to Christianity,
Winter can cite approvingly a Qur'anic scholar: "In no way, then,
does biblical Christianity remain a fully valid 'way of salvation'
after the advent of Muhammad" (see Abraham's Children,
edited by Norman Solomon, Richard Harries, and Tim Winter, T &
T Clark, 2005).
It is unclear to me how Race would respond to Winter. Islam,
after all, denies the crucifixion. One aim of Christian-Muslim
dialogue is to explore patiently the origins, meaning, history, and
significance of such differences rather than speculate that such
differences can be encompassed within an "unknowable" transcendent
reality behind all particular religions. The irony of Race's stance
is that it, too, can become exclusivist: Buddhists can be embraced,
but Muslims . . . ? Indeed, most of the examples in Race's book are
drawn from Hinduism and Buddhism, with only a couple of perfunctory
references to Islam.
Both books convince me that insights won through improved
Jewish-Christian relations do not necessarily transfer to
Christian-Muslim relations. The hard work of encounter and
questioning must continue, and may well yield some provisional
conclusions that may contribute to Race's ambition for a theology
of religions, but not yet.
Dr Philip Lewis is Interfaith Adviser to the Bishop of
Bradford, and is lecturer in Peace Studies at Bradford
University.