Filling the Gaps in God – A Shared Language of Religious Difference

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 8:08 pm by Robert Hunt

Filling the Gaps in God – A Shared Language of Religious Difference 2015-03-13T20:08:14-06:00 Robert Hunt

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

In my last blog I suggested that God doesn’t fill the gaps in human knowledge. To the contrary, we humans are the gaps in God, the places where God is alienated from God’s own full love and participation in creation. The gaps are created by human conflict and a failure to work together for the flourishing of God’s creation.

A major reason for this is our propensity for inter-religious conflict. The causes of such conflict are many. In large part our conflicts arise not from religion itself, but simply because in struggles over resources we use religious affiliation as a way of choosing teams. These are serious political problems, but involve a different kind of inter-religious dialogue than that which I want to discuss today.

The specifically religious problem that makes us gaps in God is the transposition of conflicting claims about the transcendent source and end of all things into the realm of immanent social structures. Thus Christianity claims that Jesus Christ, God’s Word, is the source and end of all things. This inevitably creates conflict when it is transposed into a claim that all things must submit to Christ here and now through submission to Christ’s church. Such conflict is merely submerged when the religious other is tolerated while the business of proselytism is carried out.

A more subtle form of this transposition happens in Islam, which accepts the religious affiliation of Christians and Jews as legitimate, but only so long as Christians and Jews accept this tolerance within a distinctly Muslim understanding of of who they are: “people of the book.” It is a designation that creates a social space for religious difference, but also puts firm boundaries around that social space and explicitly acknowledges the superiority of Islam, a superiority that cannot be challenged in public.

An even more subtle form of this comes with the “one God many paths” approach associated with contemporary Hindu and pluralist movements. This approach at first appears to leave unbounded social space for each religion. But it does so by denying the validity of any exclusive claims to religious truth that these religions may have. If you are a Christian who believes that Jesus is the only way, or a Muslim who believes that the Qur’an is the final revelation, then this form of pluralism explicitly denies your central claim even as it grants you a valid path to God.

And this has public implications. Because pluralism explicitly invalidates a claim that anyone needs to change religion in order to pursue the only true path to God it leads to social pressure or, as we find in India, even to laws restricting efforts to persuade people to change religion. Christian evangelism, Buddhist persuasion, and Muslim taqwa are effectively forbidden.

To many these restrictions on religious discourse, or those posed by more obviously hegemonic claims, seem an acceptable price to pay for preventing religious conflict. I doubt it.

Religious conflict is as inevitable as political conflict and intellectual conflict. It is rooted in a desire of humans and human communities to find their identity and meaning within that which is transcendent and universal. Religion stakes a claim in the transcendent, a distinctive conceptualization of God. Alternative conceptualizations of God then pose threat to the identity of a specific religious community. Conflict of some sort results when these alternative conceptualizations engage one another.

There are at least two possible approaches to this problem. One is to restrict dialogue to those penultimate matters of human cooperation that don’t directly relate to or raise the problem of the transcendent context for human life. But this will only take us so far, because there seems to be an inherit drive for human communities to want to write their concept of the transcendent into the immanent structures of the societies in which they live, not merely their personal or communal lives.

The other is to restriction free religious exchange, including restrictions on persuasion. But this only prevents the kind of open dialogue that can lead us to more fully work together and come to some emerging concept of God, or the universal and transcendent, that can accommodate all our different religious community. And only this allow us to close the human gap in God.

By leaving unexplored the ground of religious difference we cease searching for a common language to express our human understandings of where we fit into God’s life. We return to our communitarian existence within a limited understanding of God rather than seeking some shared concept of the transcendent and universal that would allow a place for a variety of different religions.

To fill those gaps we will need a robust inter-religious dialogue that is unafraid to explore the ground of our religious differences. We may not find any immediate agreement. Yet we may find that as we translate and re-translate our essential religious insights for one another that a common language to describe our differences may emerge.

Since the first world war gave us the term “no mans land” our modern world has been characterized by formal and informal “demilitarized zones” These are places too dangerous or brutal for human habitation. In inter-religious relations we need to turn these zones into dialogue zones, because a common language to describe difference would be a tremendous step forward in filling the gaps we are in God.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

July 15, 2012

The God Particle . . and the Gaps in God

Next Post

July 23, 2012 Just Who are You?

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Christian Identity Christian Muslim Relations Home Page Inter-Religious Dialogue Uncategorized

Select a Month September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 July 2010 May 2010

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz