We had a very successful Fairfax Interfaith Friendship Walk yesterday, connecting eight houses of worship, including Daniels Run Peace Church. Between 200-300 people participated in the 3.5 mile walk. We had 200 tee shirts for participants and ran out. The photo on this blog is of the City of Fairfax mayor David Meyer thanking the participants at the end of the walk. The city police very graciously escorted us through the city streets.

Part of the motivation for the walk was to respond to recent hate speech and hate crimes in the greater Washington DC area. We, however, also wanted to learn to know our neighbors better as a way to work at some of the social challenges in our city. That happened as we stopped at each house of worship along our route and heard a brief presentation about who we are and our different ministries. Some of us have already been collaborating in addressing things such as the challenges of homelessness and affordable housing in our area.

We were encouraged to mingle and talk our neighbors from other churches and faith communities. That really happened and I consider it to be one of the greatest successes of the walk. For example, I walked beside the Father David Whitestone, the parish priest of nearby St. Leo’s Catholic Church for part of the walk and enjoyed connecting with him. I also enjoyed reconnecting with Imam Ankaya Bilal, from the Ezher Mosque, easily within walking distance of our church.

Beyond that, I met and talked with so many other people, including a man who was so interested in our church garden, the edible landscaping we’re putting in, and the fact that our new name Daniels Run Peace Church emphasizes both our commitment to our local ecosystem and our religious tradition as a peace church.

We live in an increasingly shrinking and pluralistic world. The world in all its colors is coming to us and there’s now a Buddhist temple and a Muslim mosque right next door. Our congregation is gradually building relationships with both. We have recently joined our Muslim neighbors in an Iftar dinner breaking their fast during the month of Ramadan.

How do we follow Jesus in our pluralistic world? We begin with integrity. I honestly confess that, for me, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life—the revelation and embodiment of God and God’s way (John 14: 6). The life and message of Jesus, as it is contained in Scripture and lived out in the lives of those who follow him, is indeed good news to people who are looking for life and hope.

Such good news, however, can’t be prepackaged and distributed like Coke or four spiritual laws. That quickly becomes a huge turn-off. This good news needs to be continually unpacked in relation to the world we live in and to our own journey of faith. Saying that Jesus is the “way” becomes triumphalistic when we take it to the next level and claim that all other people are outside of God’s grace.

So how do we understand Jesus’ statement, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to [God] except through me?” One approach is to counter this seemingly exclusive claim with a counter passage like Romans 2:14 where Paul argues that the Gentiles are justified by their own experience of God and their adherence to God’s law written on their hearts.  It’s a good reminder to not build our theology on one scripture passage.

We will also want to consider the question Jesus was responding to. It wasn’t, “Lord, will the Muslims and Buddhists also be saved?” Instead, it was a heartfelt response to an existential question. He had just announced his impending death—that he was going ahead to prepare the way. Thomas responded, “But Lord, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” Jesus answered, “Can’t you see? I am the way!”

Another consideration is how John’s Gospel presents Jesus. In the prologue or beginning of the Gospel, John talks about Jesus as the Logos or Word that was with God from the beginning. Jesus is the creative power and love through which God creates, sustains, and recreates the whole world. This Logos is present and active in ways that we have only begun to imagine.

Religious scholars often distinguish between three different ways of understanding our Christian faith in relation to other religions. The first emphasizes Jesus’ uniqueness. This is depicted as an “exclusive” position. Jesus alone is the way. Those who do not confess Jesus as their Lord and Savior cannot know God.

A Hindu friend once accusingly told me that both Muslims and Christians are exclusivists who claim we are the only true religion. He said we’re always trying to proselytize and convert others. This raises the profound difference between honestly sharing our faith and trying to convert people or thinking we’re the one true faith.

The second is an “inclusive” position which builds on the Christology of John’s Gospel. It holds that the same Logos or Word which we know and experience in Christ is also present in other religions. In this respect, Catholic theologian Karl Rahner raised the possibility that devout adherents of other religions may be “anonymous Christians.” Some Muslims has a similar understanding of devout people from other religions as being “submitted to God” or Muslim.

The third is a “pluralist position which emphasizes the distinctiveness of each religion. It doesn’t want to combine them or flatten them out as somehow basically the same. Each religion has its own unique merits and is, in its own way, an expression of God’s love and grace. Each religion, including Christianity, however, also contains elements that are less than good and even evil.

These three positions are often seen as distinct but Bill Cenkner, my religion professor at Catholic University, taught me to see them as overlapping models. There are parts of each model that we find to be true but all are inadequate by themselves. As a Christian I confess that Jesus is the way. Through Jesus I understand God and God’s way in the world. This is good news that I freely share with others. In this sense, Jesus is unique. But that does not mean that I think people who do not believe in Jesus are going to hell.

This is where the inclusivist position helps me. God’s Spirit is greater than any one historical religious expression of faith. If we confess that God is the creator of everything we should expect God’s Spirit to be present and active in all cultures and their religious traditions. Many devout people from other religions have a winsome faith and moral integrity that can put Christians to shame. We might understand such faith as an expression of the same Logos or Word of God that we have come to know in Christ.

Still, I get uncomfortable when we speculate that people from other religions may be anonymous Christians. This is not because I want to insist on the exclusive claims of my Christian faith but rather because I want to respect and understand people from other religions for who they are. In that sense I’m a pluralist.

When we do that we can have mutually respectful relationships and honest conversations with all kinds of people in our pluralistic world—including those who profess no faith. We will often be profoundly impressed by their moral integrity and their deep faith. We will want to be open to the possibility that God’s Spirit can also speak to us through them.

I have found that when we approach others with such respect they are also open to hear about our faith and about what it means to follow Jesus in all of life. We don’t always get it right but we discover that, through such relationships, we grow in maturity as God’s people and that our faith in Jesus is deepened.

For me, Jesus is the way, the truth and the life—the revelation and embodiment of God and God’s way in the world. The message of Jesus, as contained in the Bible and lived out in the lives of those who follow him, is certainly good news to people who are searching for life and hope. I continue to experience the difference it has made in my life as well as the lives of others. I can still see the face of a young man who had recently committed his life to Christ after years of struggle. He was finally in touch with God, with himself, and the world around him. There was magic in that moment.

Such good news, however, can’t be prepackaged and distributed like Coca Cola. Our faith needs to be continually renewed and deepened in relation to the kind of world we live in as well as our personal journeys of faith. Our confession that Jesus is the way becomes toxic when we make the doubly exclusive claim that all who have not confessed Jesus as savior are outside the grace of God.

I once had a conversation with a college student who was a new Christian. She was so happy and sure about the faith she had found in Jesus. But she was deeply concerned that her Jewish grandparents might be going to hell because they didn’t believe in Jesus, even though they were very loving and moral people. My heart ached for the young student and her family. Who had taught her such ugly theology?

There are various places where I have found wisdom for negotiating this new interfaith world as a follower of Jesus. One is the tight-knit Old Order Mennonite community I grew up in. Old Order people are very reticent about any claims of being “saved” and say that such questions or claims about our eternal destiny are best left in the hands of God. I remember my Dad lecturing me about that after a neighboring farmer who was not a church member committed suicide.

Another source of wisdom is the book, The Open Secret, by the British mission scholar Leslie Newbigin that I read before going on our first mission assignment in the Philippines. He told us that it’s a fallacy to think we will be bringing God to the places where we go to serve. God’s Spirit is present and at work among a people and their culture long before we arrive and will still be there after we leave.

Yet another is the Catholic theologian Hans Küng who wrestled with the exclusive ancient Christian dogma that there is no salvation outside the church. He says we should not use such a teaching to condemn people from other religions. Instead, he turns it into the positive confession that he has personally found salvation here.

I find wisdom in such approaches. Let’s stick to our personal confession of faith and let the rest in the hands of our just and gracious God. With that, let’s consider words of Jesus in John’s Gospel that are often used by people making religiously exclusive claims, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14: 6). How do we understand that?

I especially appreciate what Diana Eck, a well-known religion scholar and church woman, has to say about this in her book Encountering God. According to her, we need to consider the question that Jesus was responding to. It’s wasn’t, “Lord, will the Muslims, the Buddhists, and the Hindus also be saved?” Instead, it was Jesus’ response to personal faith crisis. He had just announced his impending death—that he was going to leave them. He was going ahead to prepare the way.

Thomas panicked, “But Lord, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way? Jesus lovingly assured him, “Can’t you see? I am the way!” An important part of this consideration is the way John’s Gospel presents Jesus as the Logos or Word which has been with God from the beginning. Jesus embodies the creative power and love through which God creates, sustains, and recreates the world. Gandhi’s word Satyagraha “soul-force” comes to mind. Encountering this divine presence or Word in Jesus does not preclude encountering it in other places.

Religion scholars distinguish between three different ways of understanding our Christian faith in relation to other religious traditions. I first learned this from Calvin Shenk who taught world religions when I was an undergraduate student at Eastern Mennonite University. I still have fond memories of the field trip he took us on to visit a Buddhist temple and a Muslim mosque. Some of us were very nervous about whether or how we should participate in such religious observances.

The first position is an exclusivist position that emphasizes Jesus’ uniqueness. Jesus alone is the way. Those who do not confess Jesus as Lord cannot know God.

The second is an inclusivist position that builds on John’s Gospel. The same Logos or Word of God, which we have experienced in Christ, is surely also present in other religious traditions.  Some Christian theologians even speculate that devout, loving, and righteous people from other religions are anonymous Christians. Interestingly, some Muslims have a similar understanding of devout people from other religions being submitted to God or Muslim. The Arabic word Islam means submission to Allah or God.

The third is a pluralist position that emphasizes the distinctiveness of each religion. It refuses to combine them or flatten them out as basically the same. Most people who hold this position insist that every religion is, in its own way, an expression of God’s grace. They also recognize that each religion, including Christianity, contains elements that are less that good or even evil. Calvin Shenk used to tell us that we should never compare what we consider to be good in our religion with that which we consider to be bad in another religion.

These three positions are often seen as fixed paradigms that exclude each other. I prefer to see them as overlapping models. There are parts of each that I find to be true but I also find that each is inadequate by itself.

For example, I personally confess that Jesus is the way the truth and the life. I understand God and God’s way in the world through him. This is the good news that I freely share with others. In this sense, Jesus is unique. Like Catholic theologian Hans Küng, I confess that I have found salvation here.

Yet, the insight that God’s Spirit is greater than any one religion is also persuasive. If we believe that God is the creator of the whole world, we should expect God’s Spirit to be present and active in all cultures and their religious traditions. We might even understand this as the same Logos or Word of God that we have come to know in Jesus. In this sense, it may include much more than we imagine.

Still, I get uncomfortable when we begin speculating that people from other religious traditions are anonymous Christians. It’s not because I want to insist on an exclusive claim for my Christian faith but rather because I want to respect and understand people of other religious backgrounds on their own terms. I want to honor our religious pluralism.

   Buddhist Temple Next to our Church

Religious pluralism has become a part of life in America. I began this series of posts on interfaith relations by sharing about becoming friends with the imam of a Muslim mosque several blocks from our church. There’s also a Buddhist temple adjoining our church property. This close proximity of places of worship from three of the great world religions is indicative of our changing religious landscape.

I then noted that such religious boundaries are not as fixed as we often imagine. I talked about my encounter with Muslim man in the Philippines who has a deep respect for Jesus. I also talked about my friend in Nepal who told me that there is no clear boundary between Hinduism and Buddhism in his town. Now some scholars are arriving at surprising discoveries about what is generally assumed to be the mutually exclusive boundary between Judaism and Christianity.

It’s common knowledge that Jesus and his earliest followers were Jews. It’s also evident that neither Jesus nor his disciples consciously sought to establish a new religion. Even the Apostle Paul, evangelist to the  Gentiles, remained a practicing Jew throughout his life. The question then becomes, “How did it happen that Judaism and Christianity evolved into two distinct religions?”

It’s generally assumed that the schism happened in the first generation after Jesus’ death. Daniel Boyarin, a Jewish rabbi and scholar, and John Howard Yoder, a Christian theologian, have studied that question and come to the similar conclusion that it actually took place hundreds of years later. (See Boyarin’s book Border Lines and Yoder’s book The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited. See also the chapter “Interfaith Conversations” that I co-wrote with J. Denny Weaver in his forthcoming edited book John Howard Yoder: Radical Theologian.)

Followers of Jesus and other Jews certainly disagreed about the claim that Jesus was the Messiah but that in itself did not lead to a parting of ways. Judaism was able to absorb such differences as it had absorbed other messianic claims. More crucial to the eventual schism were political-religious factors related to Christianity becoming the religion of the Roman Empire. It was a long, drawn-out process, but the schism was given the status of imperial law in 438 in the Code of Theodosius, which established Christianity as the true religion and Judaism as a false religion.

How do we understand and respond to this history in our day? Yoder came to the conclusion that the historical trajectory could have gone in a different direction and that the schism did not have to take place. Boyarin acknowledges this yet sees value in distinct religious traditions. This raises the question of how we affirm our faith traditions in ways that respect people of other faiths and enable us all to work together for the common good. To make it personal, “How do I unabashedly live and share my faith?”

As a Christian it will include sharing my personal faith in God through Jesus. Furthermore, like Gandhi, it gives me the freedom to learn from others and to “experiment with truth” from other sources in ways that enrich my faith and the way I live my life. It also means learning how to be good neighbors with people of all faiths in our increasingly pluralistic communities.

All of this often involves concrete pastoral matters. Interfaith marriages are becoming more common and this creates unique challenges for faith communities. Among them are finding ways to conduct ceremonies such as weddings, funerals, and other religious rituals in a way that is rooted in our faith and still respects and, as much as possible, includes the faith and religious sensibilities of other family members.

A personal experience was officiating at a child blessing at our church where the mother of the child was Christian and the father was Jewish. I remember using our blessing liturgy in a way that expressed our faith yet slightly adapting it in ways to not create offense or make it unnecessarily uncomfortable for the Jewish side of the family to participate. We even included them by having them read a blessing to the child that drew on their Jewish faith traditions.

In many ways we’re only beginning this interfaith journey in America.

Statue of Gandhi in Kolkata, India

Mahatma Gandhi, a devout Hindu, had an extraordinary ability to draw from various religious and secular resources in his nonviolent struggle for human dignity and Indian independence. He described his life’s work as “experiments in truth.” His deep respect for the basic humanity of all people allowed him to embrace “truth” wherever he found it and to incorporate it into his life and social strategy.

Gandhi’s respect for the basic humanity of everyone even extended to his adversaries. Jan Smuts, a wily segregationist military general and politician, was his primary adversary when he fought to end segregation in South Africa. He refused to vilify Smuts even after he jailed Gandhi and refused to honor an earlier compromise agreement they had reached. Smuts, in turn, learned to respect Gandhi and, later in life, even esteemed him.

When Gandhi returned to India, his many interfaith friends included Abdul Ghaffar Kahn, the towering Muslim Pashtun pacifist who fought alongside him in the independence movement. Another was Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer who introduced him to the nonviolence of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Yet another Madeleine Slade, who Gandhi affectionately nicknamed Mirabehn, was from an aristocratic British family. She became part of his inner circle and worked with him for many years.

From his Hindu tradition, Gandhi drew on religious holidays and purity rituals to develop nonviolent political actions of general strikes and boycotts. From the Sermon on the Mount, he learned the persuasive power of loving one’s enemies. From secular principles of equality, freedom, and the rule of law, he developed the action of civil disobedience to unjust laws. Going to jail for refusing to obey an unjust law applies moral and social pressure on the government.

I have come to appreciate the genius of Gandhi’s ability to cross religious and social boundaries and to experiment with the “truth” he found in diverse places. People of all faiths can learn from him. For example, a deeply troubling religious phenomenon is an exclusivism that disparages others and easily becomes narrow and violent. We usually associate this with religious fundamentalism but there are forms of liberalism that are equally demeaning. Those of us from monotheistic religious traditions can be especially susceptible to such self-duplicity. It’s so easy to imagine we’re fighting the good fight against our enemies, even going to war, with God on our side.

That way of framing the struggle was foreign to Gandhi, which can most likely be attributed to the fact that he was a devout Hindu. When I lived in India, the sheer number of Hindu gods and the seemingly never-ending seasonal festivals celebrating one or another of those gods astonished me. We Westerners tend to think of this as unbridled polytheism but that’s mistaken. My Hindu friends told me that there is instead one divine Other but in many forms.

What can those of us from monotheistic religions learn from the Hindu understanding of “the one and the many?” It’s certainly a reminder that we dare not succumb to the temptation to think that we have a handle on the divine. God is beyond our understanding or ability to imagine. Humility and respect for all others are therefore always necessary religious virtues.

A Local Temple in Nepal

One of the challenges of spiritual growth is developing the ability to step outside of the world we live in and to enter the worlds of other people. We never do that completely, nor would we want to. Yet my ability to understand myself and my world depends on my ability to, at least in some respect, enter the worlds of other peoples and to see myself from that perspective. It also enables me to enhance and enrich my faith through the things I learn from others.

The best and perhaps only way to truly do that is through cultivating friendships with people who come from different cultural, social, and spiritual backgrounds. That is the interfaith journey I began traveling when I became friends with a Filipino pastor and met a Muslim man from Pakistan who told me of his deep respect for Jesus. There was no turning back. To use an analogy from J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, I was Frodo Baggins the hobbit who left the shire in a spiritual quest among many different peoples. Frodo would eventually return as a different and wiser person who never again comfortably fit back into life in the shire in the same way.

When we do that we realize that the various boundaries we meet are not as fixed or impermeable as we imagine. Part of our perception that there are fixed boundaries comes from our modern, scientific penchant to categorize things in our effort to understand and manipulate them. They’re instead generally more fluid than we imagine. For example, before I worked in Nepal and learned to know a Nepalese man named Bal Krishna, I thought of Hinduism and Buddhism as two distinct religions. They probably never were, as least not in Nepal.

Bal Krishna and I became good friends and had lots in common as we worked together at various peacebuilding and rural development projects. I thought he was Hindu because he is named after the Hindu god Krishna. Then I visited his village and he showed me the local Hindu temple and but also various Buddhist shrines near his home. When I asked about that, he told me that he considers himself to be a Buddhist but these categories overlap in his community. It helps to recognize that Westerners created these fixed Asian religious categories during the colonial era.

This realization gave me new eyes to look at my own religious heritage. Certainly, the lines separating Christian denominations are fluid and porous. Doing my graduate studies in religion and culture at a Catholic university gave me an added understanding of the differences and similarities between Catholicism and my own Anabaptist heritage. Studying among Catholics gave me another window into my community of faith.

Beyond that, it made me take a closer look at the broader religious categories in my world. We think of Judaism and Christianity as distinct religions, yet we share the scriptures that Judaism calls the Torah and Christians call the Old Testament. Furthermore, Jesus and his first disciples were Jews. And Islam has historical roots in both Judaism and Christianity. We all trace our faith heritage back to Abraham.

Recognizing such historical relationships gives us a greater capacity to relate to others and, in turn, to grow spiritually. There’s risk in passing over, immersing oneself in another religious world and then returning home, as there are risks in any friendship. Still the rewards are far greater. I’ll write more about this in my next blog.