Learned Ignorance: Intellectual Humility among Jews, Christians and Muslims
Language: English
Pages: 360
ISBN: 0199769311
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Constructive interreligious dialogue is only a recent phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century, most dialogue among believers was carried on as a debate aimed either to disprove the claims of the other, or to convert the other to one's own tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missionaries of different denominations had created such a cacophony amongst themselves in the mission fields that they decided that it would be best if they could begin to overcome their own differences instead of confusing and even scandalizing the people whom they were trying to convert. By the middle of the twentieth century, the horrors of the Holocaust compelled Christians, especially mainline Protestants and Catholics, to enter into a serious dialogue with Jews, one of the consequences of which was the removal of claims by Christians to have replaced Judaism, and revising text books that communicated that message to Christian believers.
Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many branches of Christianity, not least the Catholic Church, are engaged in a world-wide constructive dialogue with Muslims, made all the more necessary by the terrorist attacks of September 11. In these new conversations, Muslim religious leaders took an important initiative when they sent their document,''A Common Word Between Us,'' to all Christians in the West. It is an extraordinary document, for it makes a theological argument (various Christians in the West, including officials at the Vatican, have claimed that a ''theological conversation'' with Muslims is not possible) based on texts drawn from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an, that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers share the God-given obligation to love God and each other in peace and justice.
The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies brought together an international group of sixteen Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim scholars to carry on an important theological exploration of the theme of ''learned ignorance.''
sins. [You are] not from a people that will prevent this sort of thing. On the contrary, [your children] become accustomed to sin . . . . No one can deny that all these good traits which I mentioned are found among the Jews and [that] their opposites [are found] among Christians.66 Kimhi argued that Jews, by following Torah, had attained a higher level of morality than their lawless Christian neighbors.67 ■ SOURCES OF ARROGANCE: ONENESS The biblical assertion of God’s oneness that became
in an age with many religious slogans. This is also consistent and similar to the Qur’anic emphasis on consequence, as we will see later in connection to tyranny and injustice. The sheer survival of these major religious traditions and their indisputable grip on the imagination of billions of people speak to a great potential and the light of Truth within these ancient teachings, which have yet to bear fruit: 174 ■ lear ned ig nor ance The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution,
However, these treatises do not raise the virtue of humility as a primary requisite for engaging the other traditions in discourse. It would be risible to think of Jewish authors suggesting that their religious truth was linked to a lower order of either personal virtue or intellectual power than those demanded or disclosed by interlocutors from other religious traditions. However, when these traditions turn away from one another and toward God or Allah who is Creator, Revealer, and Redeemer,
in Jerusalem turned out to be a very good idea! ■ TRIALOGUES IN CONTEXT Interreligious dialogue is not new. One prominent form over the centuries has been the religious disputation, in which religious thinkers aimed to prove their opponents wrong and convince them to convert to the “winner’s” religion. Carefully structured arguments between Jews and Christians, Christians and Muslims, and Muslims and Jews aimed to discredit the religious claims of the opponent. It is only 6 ■ lear ned ig nor
an idol, that is, without putting a human—far too human—answer in place of the divine question he asks to his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?”28 Let a few reflections on the final phrasing of the Christological dogma defined at Chalcedon suffice. It has been rightly described as a “riddle” pointing at “a new and surprising reality which we could not previously have thought possible,” namely “the reality of Christ’s hypostasis”29—a remarkable literary achievement in learned ignorance. The