Forget God, Interreligious Understanding begins with Anthropology

Last updated on: January 17, 2016 at 10:02 am by Robert Hunt

Forget God, Interreligious Understanding begins with Anthropology 2016-01-17T10:02:22-07:00 Robert Hunt

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The single most important question in interreligious dialogue today is not theological. Is anthropological. And it arises because between the different religions there are fundamentally different ways of understanding not merely what it means to be human but how humans find out what it means to be human.

At a recent interfaith dialogue involving Jews, Christians, and Muslims a Jewish woman asked both Christians and Muslims present to explain why they used the exclusive and excluding masculine pronoun to refer to God. Did they think God was a man?

The answer from the Muslim participants was straight forward. Although God as understood in Islam has no gender, and is beyond gender distinctions, both the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad refer to God exclusively using Arabic words that are masculine, or are masculine formulations. Thus Muslims both follow the precedent offered by the prophet, and respect God’s clear wishes by referring to God in gendered language. God had a choice. God chose. Humans would be disrespectful to ignore God’s choice. Just as it would be disrespectful for us to refer to one another in terms the other wouldn’t choose.

Another participant asked about Conservative Christian opposition to gay marriage, and both Muslims and Christians offered a similar answer. An answer, I might add, that I’ve heard echoed by Orthodox Jews (who were not represented at this particular meeting.)

And that answer highlighted the belief that both gender and gender roles were determined by God and specified in scripture. In the Bible and the Qur’an God creates only two genders: male and female. And God specifies that their purpose is to enter into a male-female relationship called marriage and through sexual relations in marriage to have children.

Again, for these participants because God has specified both human nature and human relations all humans are obliged to submit to God’s Word and conform to God’s will – regardless of their personal sense of self and personal path of fulfillment.

What we can see in both cases is that the authoritative source for human self-understanding is not human self examination, or even scientific study, but the study of Revelation. Neither Muslims nor conservative Christians said that the Bible and the Qur’an were the only source of knowledge. But on the matters in which they believe that it speaks clearly (and both agreed it spoke clearly on these matters) then it overrides all other potential sources of truth.

Put another way, and one imam present told me this, the job of humans is to fulfill God’s plan for them, not to make their own plans. Or as Ibn Taymiyya is said to have said. “Our task is not to love God, but to obey God’s command.” But that is, of course, an old Christian trope as well. “Not my will, but thine O Lord, be done.”

Now at first this might seem like a difference in understanding of the how scripture is interpreted, or where its authority lies; and this is a classically theological question: a question about the nature of revelation. Yet it seems to me that what underlies any theology of revelation is the self-understanding, the anthropology of the recipients of revelation.

We as humans will accept statements about ourselves in revelation that are in conflict with our ordinary sense of self, as it is constructed by both personal experience and socialization, if we find that revelation is more reliable than our own experience because it brings to light and amplifies aspects of our own experience of self that seem otherwise hidden and which when revealed give us empowering insight into our own behavior.

For decades I taught primarily converts to Christianity from Hinduism and traditional Chinese religions. Almost uniformly their experience of the gospel was that it clarified their personal self-understanding in ways that gave them new possibilities, attractive possibilities, for living. It gave them a better anthropology, and frequently their theology, including the nature of their confidence in revelation followed somewhat unreflectively.

Is it really surprising that a person who finds the Genesis narrative a compelling account of what it means to be a human in the world will be inclined to take it seriously? And that if taking it seriously means, in their culture, taking it literately they will do so?

It seems to me that if we can see and understand this process we’ll open some new avenues for inter-religious dialogue. If we can begin with an agreement that our experience of revelation demands that it be taken seriously – precisely because it has given us a more functional anthropology – then we can then move to the important question of what it means to take revelation seriously, something too rarely explored in an interfaith environment.

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