 1.
Interfaith services constitute the clearest example of members of different
religions standing up and saying: Our faith and our spirituality serve
to bring us together with members of other faiths, and not to keep us separate
and always on the defence.
2.
Interfaith services have to reckon with critical objections:
- suspicion of syncretism
- suspicion of denying
the truth-claims of one’s religion
- suspicion of mutual
takeover
- suspicion of using
religion for purposes of show
3.
Interfaith services can become the touchstone of sincere forms of interfaith
encounter:
-
through people taking it in turns at being each other’s guests
-
through people bearing full witness to their individual faith openly and
authentically
-
through people becoming sensitive to the spiritual riches available in
other traditions
-
through focusing on the true substance of issues which affect patterns
of coexistence and mutual interaction between religions
4.
Interfaith services can be a preparation for shared global responsibility
on the part of religions. They can be a forum for showing how the spiritual
foundations of religious traditions yield beliefs and values commensurate
with the global challenges that we all face, as these are spelled out in
the Conciliar Movement for justice, peace, and integrity of creation (or
conservation of the conditions of life), and in the Global Ethic Project
with its ‘four irrevocable directives’ (respect for all life, solidarity,
truthfulness, partnership). They provide a basis on which to nurture both
the powers of imagination necessary, and also the stamina needed for the
long haul towards joint action. |
The
title of this paper contains a thesis – and I think that for those who
have been involved in interfaith worship this thesis will not come across
as mere theory, but as reflecting actual experience. For where could the
notion that spirituality and ethics are interrelated be more apparent anywhere
than in an interfaith service?
At
the same time it is neither obvious nor to be taken for granted either
a) that there should be interfaith services at all, or b) that when they
do take place, they include reference to social and moral responsibility. |
joint pilgrimage at Nuremberg |
Interfaith
services are of recent origin – a generation ago they would still have
been unthinkable. And the fact that on these occasions members of different
religions feel able to enter jointly into a shared responsibility is a
further step, indicating that people are not coming together without a
sense of obligation.
The
title of my paper contains, though, a third element, that of learning.
Interfaith services as a place of learning? Is this anything more than
a quirk on the part of a religious educationalist constantly on the lookout
for learning-opportunities?
I
think not. Certainly I personally would insist – and so would many others
who have taken part in such services – that I have learned more through
preparing, planning, and participating in them than in almost any other
way.
Let
me now trace the steps I have taken along this path of learning, which
is so central to the concerns of this whole conference.
My
first involvement with an interfaith service occurred in 1989, at the World
Assembly of the World Conference on Religion and Peace in Melbourne. Very
early on the morning of Sunday 28th January, six hundred conference delegates,
drawn from seventeen religions and from all parts of the world, gathered
on the ocean shore. Everyone conducted their devotions according to their
own religious tradition: Buddhist nuns were immersed in silent meditation,
with Hindus alongside them. Jews recited psalms in Hebrew, and Christians
stood with hands folded in prayer. As the sun slowly rose across the water,
two Jains from India walked in their white robes into the waves and performed
their morning prayers in its rays. As for me, taking my horn I played the
chorale ‘Morgenglanz der Ewigkeit’ – ‘Morning Radiance of Eternity’ – towards
the back amidst the trees. The Reverend Achilles, pastor of the German-speaking
Lutheran church in Melbourne, wrote subsequently: ‘A breath of eternity
infused the occasion’.
In
stark contrast, however, was a different event at the same conference.
During an interval on the first day of the plenary sessions an American
Buddhist stepped to the microphone and read out a moving peace message
– one significant too for our attitudes towards the environment – from
the Dalai Lama. As soon as the Chinese delegates heard this in simultaneous
translation, they tore off their headphones and left the auditorium, threatening
indeed to leave the conference. The General Secretary of the WCRP at the
time, John Taylor, struggled to pour oil on troubled waters, and issued
an urgent appeal to delegates only to read out messages approved beforehand
by the conference organisers.
This is where I learned my first lesson in this kind of context. I was
faced with the question: How can this contradiction be overcome – between
peaceful spirituality on the one hand, and harsh political-ideological
reality on the other? Is there not here a fundamental tension in which
religions are constantly caught, and which requires sustained rigorous
action for there to be any hope of its resolution? Do interfaith services
achieve anything more than present a pleasant front which, however, does
not withstand close scrutiny? |
My
first thesis stands in conscious opposition to this view:
1.
Interfaith services constitute the clearest example of members of different
religions standing up and saying: Our faith and our spirituality serve
to bring us together with members of other faiths, and not to keep us separate
and always on the defence.
Interfaith
services are a milestone in the process of interfaith encounter and dialogue
– a process which now extends beyond simple visits, and observation of
each other’s forms of spirituality, to their actual incorporation as living
and appreciated reality.
The
best known example of this is the prayers for peace hosted by the Pope
in Assisi in 1986. It was perceived worldwide as giving a signal – and
evoked much criticism of the Pope in his own church!
One
year later religious leaders met for prayer again, this time on Mount Hiei,
near Kyoto in Japan.
A
variant of this kind of occasion is when interfaith services are triggered
by an immediate cause, for example the interfaith services which filled
our churches at the beginning of the Gulf War, highlighting the field of
social and political responsibility.
The
lesson to be drawn from these interfaith services that there is a felt
need, at the very deepest levels of our faith communities, to experience
spirituality in a way that transcends religious boundaries and relates
to the challenges we face in the world today.
On
the other hand, it was precisely these spontaneously organised interfaith
gatherings that sparked off protests, at times furious, on the part of
conservative evangelical Christians in particular. One critic of the interfaith
service that occurred at the time of the Gulf War, in the Church of the
Holy Trinity in Regensburg, urged that the church had been desecrated from
the Church of the Three in One to the Church of Take Your Pick of Any Three
You Fancy! And after our first interfaith service at St. Martha’s here
in Nurnberg in 1989, two loyal church members made an official complaint
against their pastor with Lutheran church leaders at regional level. |
Turning
now to my second thesis, I list the most important points of criticism
that are constantly levelled at the notion of interfaith services:
2.
Interfaith services have to reckon with critical objections:
-
suspicion of syncretism
-
suspicion of denying the truth-claims of one’s religion
-
suspicion of mutual takeover
-
suspicion of using religion for purposes of show |
Prof. Lähnemann in
action |
Suspicion of Syncretism is suggested
when people see priests and other officials from a variety of religions
standing peacefully next to each other and apparently fully participating
in each other’s prayers. The commonly used expression ‘interfaith prayers’
confirms this suspicion, intimating: Everyone here is praying together
irrespective of which religion they belong to. Yet how and to whom are
they actually praying? Christian prayer in the proper sense is always prayer
in the name of Christ, with reference to God as Three in One – and hence
in the last analysis incapable of being performed by Jews or Muslims. And
how can Buddhists join in prayers by Jews, Christians, Muslims or Bahais
when they themselves reject the necessity of a relationship with a personal
God?
Suspicion of denying
the truth-claims of one’s religion is suggested when prayers and meditations
from various religions apparently receive equal recognition. Am I any longer
taking my own faith seriously – Jesus as Saviour? Or total submission to
the one God in Islam? Or rituals for better karma in Hinduism? Does faith
not end up as something shapeless, if everything is being regarded as equally
valid (and hence, by implication, as a matter of indifference)?
Suspicion of mutual
takeover arises when one religion claims to incorporate all others, as
easily happens with New Religious Movements in particular. Yet it is a
stance that one comes across too in Christianity, Islam and Hinduism: One
takes from each religion everything assimilable into one’s own. Hence one
sees others as anonymous Christians, Muslims or Hindus, rather than as
people with their own distinctive roots and identity that they wish to
affirm and maintain.
Suspicion of using
religion for purposes of show means an alleged misuse of prayer for outward
display, as though it were more effective for members of all the different
religions to pray together on public display than for each person to pray
in the space set aside in their own traditions for prayer or meditation
– or indeed in the quiet of their own room.
Each of these critical
objections needs to be taken seriously, not least because they are for
the most part expressed by extremely pious and committed believers.
This is where the
next step on the path of learning, or discovery, needed to be taken. We
were forced to ask the basic question: What does this shared enterprise
really mean? Why do we find it important? How are we to counter misunderstandings?
In our established
Lutheran church in the state of Bavaria, a lengthy discussion was conducted
on just these issues. The theological faculties in Erlangen, Munich and
Neuendettelsau were asked by the bishop of the region to produce statements.
The suggestion from Neuendettelsau was that one might refer to ‘multireligious’
rather than ‘interreligious’ prayers, as a means of reflecting the plurality
and distinctness of religious traditions as represented in interfaith services,
where they certainly do not get blurred into one. In the work of
the WCRP it is one of the basic tenets that one should avoid any kind of
syncretism in which the identity of individual religious traditions would
be denied, and transmuted into an allegedly higher form of religion. Equally
there should be no attempt at proselytisation – meaning questionable kinds
of conversion where one seeks to get others to switch allegiance through
one’s powers of persuasion, or by pressurising them, or by material incentives
– in sum, by unacceptable or indeed dishonest means. Conversely there is
conscious acknowledgement of the fact that everyone taking part in interfaith
encounter and interfaith services does so as a committed representative
of their own particular faith wishing to bear testimony to it out of their
own sense of conviction. The lesson we have learned in this respect is
that measures are needed, and rules not only introduced but also actually
practised, which enable forms of encounter characterised by sincerity and
integrity. |
This leads
straight to my third thesis:
3.
Interfaith services can become the touchstone of sincere forms of interfaith
encounter:
-
through people taking it in turns at being each other’s guests
-
through people bearing full witness to their individual faith openly and
authentically
-
through people becoming sensitive to the spiritual riches available in
other traditions
-
through focusing on the true substance of issues which affect patterns
of coexistence and mutual interaction between religions |
Hindu temple
Professor Lähnemann
routinely leads his students to different places of worship in Nuremberg. |
The notion of people taking
it in turns at being each other’s guests is a particularly apt image both
for mutual visits to each other’s places of worship, and also for shared
interfaith services. For being a guest means being welcome, being there
by invitation to see, hear and feel something of a faith community’s spirituality.
We learn much more about a faith in this sort of way as compared with a
straightforward academic description. Conversely, being a guest means not
being subject to undue demands, not being required to take part in anything
one feels uncomfortable with; while at the same time acknowledging the
dignity of the religious service being performed, keeping alert to all
its aspects, ready to listen and to learn what it is that is of importance
for one’s host, and why, and further respecting what seems alien and meaningless.
People bearing full
witness to their individual faith openly and authentically is a particularly
important part of the learning curve. ‘Authentically’ means not relativising
the particular contours of one’s own faith, not playing them down for the
sake of harmony, but retaining them in all their distinctness. ‘Openly’
means keeping others firmly in mind as I display my own faith, and reflecting
carefully on how best to make my tradition accessible to them, while at
the same time maintaining respect for them in their difference. This learning
process is particularly intense when a group of people come together to
organise an interfaith service, and have to select readings, hymns, symbols,
and so on – this is where the very bases of a faith can be explained, erroneous
preconceptions corrected, and fresh levels of understanding reached.
It was with all this
in mind that in one of our interfaith services in Nurnberg – indeed, not
long after all the uproar there had been surrounding the judgment about
crucifixes being displayed in schools – we took religious symbols as our
theme, opening up the meaning of a central symbol from each religion in
turn, supported by the reading of a relevant prayer. In the case of the
Cross, attention was drawn to the way in which it indicates, to us Christians,
the path of lowliness taken by God in Jesus, and thus His participation
in the extremes of human suffering, his love for humanity, and his forgiveness.
Relatedly Buddhists, for example, made clear, through the symbol of the
Wheel of Dhamma, how the Buddha set in motion the teachings which have
become for his followers their guide along the way of enlightenment.
Becoming sensitive
to the spiritual riches available in other traditions means learning to
avoid presenting one’s own in a positive light by denigrating others’ ,
and beginning instead to become attentive to modes (oral, visual, emotional)
in which spirituality in other traditions’ forms of prayer and meditation
can be disclosed to me as an outsider.
Wesley Arjarajah,
for many years Assistant General Secretary of the World Council of Churches,
tells in this connection of his experience of being invited for the first
time by a Hindu friend to visit his temple in Sri Lanka. Observing the
bright colours all around, listening to the bells being rung to welcome
the believers, astonished at the multiplicity of statues and symbols, and
at how whole families brought their offerings and lingered before the shrines
to the gods, he thought: ‘But what a real sense of holiness there is here
after all! How very straightforward and sober are services in my own Methodist
church by comparison: A welcome, then a hymn, a reading, a hymn, a reading,
another hymn, the sermon, yet another hymn, prayers, the blessing….’ Nevertheless,
he in turn invited his Hindu friend to a service in his church. Afterwards
the friend embraced him, saying what a wonderful experience it had been
– the church members all gathering together at the same time of the week,
singing together, listening reverently to God’s word being interpreted
to them, pooling offerings to be used for worthwhile social purposes.
Focusing on the true
substance of issues which affect patterns of coexistence and mutual interaction
between religions means first of all learning to dismantle the barriers
that prevent us working together. This includes working away at the images
we have of each other, and dealing honestly with our past. Much needs to
be done to reappraise the historical baggage with which relations between
religions are burdened. A willingness to admit to mistakes made in the
past, and a determination to avoid them in future, is important for every
religion. And hence one of the themes chosen for our interfaith services
was ‘Changing one’s ways – purifying one’s spirit’. One practical indication
of this was when in 1996, at our Jubilee service, the Roman Catholic Regional
Dean here in Nurnberg, Theo Kellerer, welcomed the President of the Israeli
religious community, Arno Hamburger, to the Church of the Blessed Lady
(Frauenkirche), built on the site of a synagogue destroyed in the Middle
Ages, and the latter was able to read out a message of peace on just this
spot. This was not at all a matter of outward show, however media-friendly
the occasion undoubtedly was, but a clear sign of the fresh beginning that
is so desperately needed.
A basic obligation
that cuts across all religious boundaries is solidarity with the vulnerable
and all who suffer in society. Prayer can only be undertaken with integrity
if we do not react to want with indifference. |
This
results in the 4th thesis:
4.
Interfaith services can be a preparation for shared global responsibility
on the part of religions. They can be a forum for showing how the spiritual
foundations of religious traditions yield beliefs and values commensurate
with the global challenges that we all face, as these are spelled out in
the Conciliar Movement for justice, peace, and integrity of creation (or
conservation of the conditions of life), and in the Global Ethic Project
with its ‘four irrevocable directives’ (respect for all life, solidarity,
truthfulness, partnership). They provide a basis on which to nurture both
the powers of imagination necessary, and also the stamina needed for the
long haul towards joint action. |
 |
It becomes
clear, when, for our interfaith services, we seek out basic readings and
examples from our various traditions, that each religion has something
distinctive to contribute on each of these ethical issues. It becomes apparent
that these basic texts and teachings, while not identical, nevertheless
each in their own particular way contain a profound motivation for moral
conduct – and also that parallels emerge between the different traditions.
Take,
for example, the issue of peace. In Judaism we find the notion of shalom,
which refers not simply to the absence of war, but the salvific togetherness
of a community under God’s salvific will in its most comprehensive sense.
In Christianity we find Jesus’s ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, and the
command to love one’s enemy, a command issuing from the experience of God’s
loving-kindness, and with a veritable sting when we realise that it applies
even to national and indeed religious enemies. In Islam we find a repeated
emphasis on ‘Islam’ – submission to God’s will – entailing efforts for
peace.
In
Buddhism morality is not rooted in a belief in God. Yet the enlightenment
that liberates people from attachment to ephemera generates a compassion
and equanimity which are in fundamental opposition to any kind of destructive
enmity. In every religion there is an awareness of human fallibility, of
the fact that any kind of self-idolisation precipitates dreadful disaster,
and that on the contrary people need a changing of their ways and constant
renewal in order to become emancipated from egoism. Religions also provide
consolation and hope which transcend human limitations.
The
various pictures, readings, prayers and hymns drawn from the religions
bestow concrete shape on the spiritual power that flows from the several
religious sources. At the same time, the texts are not designed for literal
repetition, but require interpretation as applied to the challenges of
today.
Let me illustrate this with reference to a prayer drawn from the Christian
tradition but which also incorporates the perspective of religious encounter.
It originated with Angelo Fernandez, first President of the WCRP, and was
introduced by him in Melbourne in 1989:
„O
Lord of all, who inspires and blesses each effort made towards better understanding,
mutual acceptance, and global solidarity, we thank you for the faith you
have granted us, and for the efforts towards a just peace which have brought
us here together.
Cleanse
us and our religious traditions from every trace of narrowness and intolerance;
bestow your spirit upon ever more people, especially the young, that they
may join forces with all those who work for peace. Support them in developing,
across all borders and beyond all selfish goals and interests, an awareness
of the unity of the human family, and in establishing responsible community.
We
beseech thee especially: grant us all the experience of deep faith, that
we may be brought ever closer to thee, source of truthfulness and compassion.
Plant in us a wideranging awareness of the unbearable burden of poverty
borne by millions of our sisters and brothers, of the ever growing divide
between North and South, and of the demonic striving for weapons of mass
destruction.
Release
in us a greater spirit of individual and social responsibility, so that
the treasures of this earth may be used, not for the destruction of our
planet, but in wise stewardship and a brightly shining flame of all-embracing
love.“
Here
moral conduct and engagement for peace are accorded a spiritual dimension
which acquires inspiration and dynamism from dedication to God.
It
was - this to be added at the end of 2001 - after the 11th September that
not only religious congregations and interfaith groups but also schools
increasingly asked for symbols, texts, prayers and ways of this kind to
gain spiritual comfort and encouragement for a moral responsibility which
transcends the borders of cultures and religions. |
|
| Revised version of my paper at the
VIIth Nürnberg Forum. Thanks to Dr. John Shepherd/Lancaster for the
translation! |
|
|
