One of the first things you learn at Seminary is that whoever wrote Ecclesiastes was right; there is truly “nothing new under the sun.”  Just about any theological argument you can think of was argued to death in the first few centuries of the Church, and the particularly juicy ones have been resurrected anew in nearly every subsequent generation.  Heresy never gets old, apparently.  If you follow the Christian blogosphere at all, then you probably remember the recent Evangelical hysteria over Rob Bell’s latest book, which espoused some of the theology of Origen, the 2nd-3rd century Church Father.  Many of Origen’s writings were retroactively branded heretical, so maybe the outrage was somewhat justified.  (As an aside, it always strikes me as a bit bizarre when Protestants start making claims to Orthodoxy. It would be like the United States suddenly making an appeal to the legitimacy of British colonial government.)

Point being, it may be the case that a certain amount of theological strife will always be with us, since doctrinal conformity tends to only be possible in the presence of a coercive force.  Theological diversity is always a mixed bag.   Over the course of America’s religious history we’ve lost some measure of religious solidarity, and maybe that’s a bad thing.  The up-side of that is that we no longer hold witch trials.  Costs and benefits, as always.

The tendency amongst more liberally-minded religious folks is to think that we’ve solved the issue of sectarianism.  We’ve read Durkheim and Eliade; we understand the nuances of culture and belief and we’re ready to engage in constructive dialogue about the meaning of religion.  Now all that remains is to get the rest of those conservative religious people to embrace a radically different worldview so that they can join in on all of the inter-faith fun.  The problem is, that sort of approach is about as constructive as a debate between new-atheist Christopher Hitchens and Christian sophist apologist Dinesh D’souza.

It is a mistake, I think, to approach inter-religious dialogue with the language and conceptual frameworks of the academy.  For those of us with academic training in Religious Studies, it seems natural to speak of “myth” and “the numinous.”  In reality, that sort of language is intentionally sterile and foreign to the religious experience of most people.  Instead, let’s try a more mystical approach on for size.  It seems to me that a lot of the same, inter-faith compatible ideas that we like so much can be conveyed in much friendlier, more “religion-y” terms.

Some of the episodes relayed in Howard Thurman’s autobiography With Head and Heart make the point better than I could.  As Thurman toured Colonial India, he was met with religious resistance from Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians alike.  His mystical understanding of Christianity allowed him to diffuse those situations as effectively as might have been expected, and it seems from his accounts that some level of understanding was usually reached.

Thurman described his interfaith predicament as such, “I had to find my way to the place where I could stand side by side with a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, and know that the authenticity of his experience was identical with the essence and authenticity of my own.”

Having reached that place of understanding, Thurman felt comfortable deflecting the numerous and sometimes aggressive religious critiques posed to him during his trip to India. One man laments to him that students who attend Indian Christian schools leave their faith but show no inclination of wanting to become Christians.  Said the Buddhist man, “if the Christian schools made them into Christians, I would have no quarrel with them. Instead, they make it easy for them to become spiritual drifters.”

Thurman seems to share his sentiment. He responds that a successful Christian education ought to make a student more authentically religious, whether in the Christian or the Buddhist tradition. The faith tradition in which one chooses to access spirituality is more or less irrelevant, because, by Thurman’s way of reckoning, “Jesus reveals to a man the meaning of what he is in root and essence already.”

In a related episode, a young, Indian Christian is distraught that Thurman neglected to mention Jesus by name in one of his lectures. “It is important that his name be lifted up that He might draw all men unto Him,” the boy says.

Thurman responds with a couple of questions, including, “Let me ask you, did my words seem to you to be true to His teaching? Did you sense His spirit in our midst?”

Although the young man was deeply troubled by Thurman’s failure to speak of his faith in the language to which he had become accustomed, Thurman was able to mediate his position much more gracefully than the typical scholar of religion might have.

Howard Thurman could talk theology and scholarship with the best of them, but when he was outside of the academy he generally chose to espouse his religious ideas in the language of his tradition.  By any measure, his interfaith ministry was very effective.  This, for me at least, is instructive.  As I attempt religious dialogue in the future, I plan on drawing much more heavily on the religious sensibilities of St. Francis or Meister Eckhart than the material I covered in Approaches to the Study of Religion.

To mangle a trite cliche, we’ll catch more interfaith understanding with mystical honey than with academic vinegar.