Divine Action, Others and Interfaith Dialogue

Abbey Road © Feldore McHugh

The air is too thin to negotiate the unfolding dramas and injustice of our contemporary world. O, Job! O, God? Where are you as theophany and theodicy vie for reality in the physical world, struggling in the darkness of human suffering? With so little oxygen, the study of spirituality rises and falls in the virtual, surreal space of global networks and think tanks, as the World Economic Forum booms and the United Nations grow frail. Now, in particular, wisdom tells us to ask the old questions. Not to forget to ask the past to speak to the present.

We must not be afraid to pose the question: How does Christian spirituality help in our current situation to think through some of the larger issues confounding global peace, prosperity, friendships, and interfaith dialogue.

Words, discourse, ideas and feelings, all of our senses are required to comprehend and query what Paul Ricœur coins the ego cogito. It comes down to “Whether the ‘I’ is posited absolutely (that is, with no reference to an other) or relatively (egology requiring the intrinsic complement of intersubjectivity).”¹ No doubt otherness is the most concrete, allusive, and ambivalent tenant of Christian spirituality. While the global lie becomes ever more fragmented—shape changing into a kaleidoscope of landscapes, no matter how immanent or transcendent God seems in Western minds, God of our book requires Christians to see others eye to eye.

MY SUFFERING OTHERNESS

As an intercultural theologian, I consider global circumstances and situations part of the hermeneutical process for interpreting scripture. As an idealist seeking a new social imaginary, I ponder “what if” questions. Assessing the divides and clefts between religions, between Islam and Christianity, I try to imagine new ways to read biblical myths, narrative, poetry, and wisdom. I wonder why twenty-first-century Western-feminist-Sarahs fail to unite with and accept our Hagars—the women next door? Where would we be had Sarai not treated Hagar harshly (Gen 16:6)? What if Sarah had not evicted Hagar (Gen 21:9– 14)? Clearly Sarah had the option to open or close her hands, but twice made fists and looked away from Hagar’s eyes to banish her finally to the wilderness (Gen 21:10). Sarah rejected Hagar and Abraham and watched the mother of his preferred son walk off into the desert (Gen 21:14).² Instead of saving Hagar’s face and lending her honor—the mark of loyalty and appreciation—rather than including her in what could have been the global Yahweh family, Sarah and Abraham rejected Hagar twice. Where was the unity, confidence, tribal belonging? Why are we so afraid of each other?

Contemporary media gods’ repeatedly point out that the peoples of the books are legally bound to meet on common ground, see eye to eye. If Christians cannot love their neighbors, then who? Of course, there is no static reply to the question of interfaith dialogue or inter-faith spirituality. Therefore, I will take responsibility for the can of worms, or Pandora’s box, which I just opened, and address the broader question: How is it that so many people who call themselves Christian are concerned with divine presence in our world yet fail to recognize the same in an other?

I begin with my present Swiss context regarding foreigners here in Switzerland. The politics of our secular and pluralist Christian nation serve as an example for Middle-Europe and its culture of subtle rejection. Afterward, memories of the inclusive nature of our Christian book should remind us of the spirituality of our community as we review the genealogy of Genesis that begins the New Testament Jesus narrative, which I already broached above. In the genealogy of the people of the Almighty God, who sees nations, women and men, and God’s agenda as a whole, together, from an inter-faith perspective, might speak. In contrast to Swiss foreign policies, the biblical theology lends honor and gravity to the significance of Christian spirituality and inter-faith dialogue in the West. After...