Respectfully Engaging World Religions

And so it becomes almost newsworthy. It actually would be reported to the news if you did it because it’s like that’s a newsworthy thing because people are hungry for people to get along, you know, in today’s context. So I think that we’re exploring in today’s conference some avenues, for example, in true pure-land Buddhism, where they have a deep sense that their only hope of salvation is through grace and through faith. And that’s such an important conversation. It’s a common conversation they can have, and it’s a helpful one to explore things. And we’re also looking at, as I said, you know, we often think about how the Bible interacts with other literature, and most people do not realize that the Bible does appear in the literature of other religions and how it interacts with that. And so especially with the Quran this is a factor, so we’re looking at okay, how do we respond when our text appear in their literature. Or if you are interacting with people and they want to look at the Quran or look at the Bible. You know, should Christians study the Quran? Should they learn the Quran? Is it helpful to do that? Those are really, really important questions.

And I think it’s really helpful, I mean even a practical message. If you give people a copy of the Gospel of John and they say well have you read the Quran, you say no, why should they take it? You say yeah, I’ve read the Quran but you should read this. And the idea of going to Surah three, for example, where it says that Jesus healed the eyes of the blind and healed the leper and then saying would you like to see where Jesus did that. There’s not a Muslim who has ever said to me “no” because their own Quran gives witness to it. So the next you know you’ve gone from the Quran to the Bible. So to me, these connections are actually helpful and open. I’ve had conversations in mosques before about the Bible with Muslims. I actually did a Q&A with Muslims about the Bible in a mosque in Boston, and it was just so interesting. And we had a Q&A afterwards, and students were watching and one of the students asked the question to the Muslim do you believe in grace. And so his answer just caught a roar from the students. He said, “Absolutely. Every Muslim believes in grace. We just believe you have to earn it.”

But with Hindus and Buddhists you definitely have to realize you’re in a different conceptual universe and their problems are different. I did a survey of Hindu leaders in different villages over a two-year period, and I asked them their own questions and perceptions of Christianity. And they were published in this little book, Your Questions, Our Answers. And what was amazing was that we were shocked by the perceptions they had about Christianity that we didn’t think they would have. And the real troubling thing was the top questions that were asked hundreds of times in villages across India were not actually addressed in our curriculum in north India. We had transported a western curriculum and we did a pretty good job learning Bible theology, church history, but we weren’t actually addressing questions that the average Hindu had.

So it shows that’s a big part of where we have to go is learning to think about education and ministry from the perspective of the unbeliever rather than from the perspective of the believer where we already have our conversation going on. And so that jump to look at the world and to look at the Gospel from another perspective and then address those questions is a really great missiological challenge that I think all seminaries are wrestling with.

But, so they had a starting point, but then he goes around and he says things to them that are what I call giving people pause. Have you thought about this? If you’re gonna box God in and think that he’s this size and he’s manageable and controllable and imageable, if I can coin a word. In spots he’s saying, “Have you thought about it this way?” And he’s challenging them but he’s challenging them by thinking about where they are starting from and in that process is opening up a future conversation which I suspect he probably had in the marketplace where he worked on a regular basis with those he was rubbing shoulders with.

And I thought to myself, “Oh boy.” I felt like I had walked into a black hole. And so I came back and talked to the staff and said there are a whole series of religions about which most of us in the West who are Christians know so little about. And I don’t want to understand it from the standpoint of is it right or wrong; I just want to understand the kind of religious experience that the person is in the midst of having and think about it that way. And I found myself, because I have had conversations with people who are in different religious contexts where they automatically see the world so differently than the way I process it. Their template is so different than mine that I do find them asking questions that do reflect on my own faith and my own spiritual walk in a way that adds a dimension that in some cases I hadn’t thought about before.

And so, in that sense, I think that we can learn and see God’s work preparing us for the Gospel. And it goes back to Clement. I mean Clement was the one that said all the time, “All truth is God’s truth, wherever it may be found.” That’s a patristic statement. Not all patristics agree with that, as you know. There was a definite reaction against that statement. But Justin Martyr, his doctrine of logos spermatikos, “the seed of the Word” in his apologies, this shows that from the very beginning the Church was asking that question. Could you requisition like John does the word logos from middle Platonism, requisition for the Gospel. Is that a one-off or is that prescriptive for us, is it just descriptive, what happens there only? Those are all rich conversation pieces that have been going on for a long time. And I think we think sometimes that we just started this conversation last Tuesday when actually the Church has been talking about these things, Gospel and culture, for centuries. It’s only a Christendom world that forgets the conversations.

And he woke up one morning and realized, “I gave them the evidence but to them it didn’t demand a verdict.” And he said, “I never really knew what to do with that.” And that shows you, and I think also it helps us see that we as leaders that are training the next generation, we train people out of our experience and background. And they’re 22, 25 years old, they’re gonna be ministering 25 years from now, and so we can’t even imagine what they’re gonna face. That’s one of the challenges in this whole enterprise because we’re equipping people for a world that we do not yet know.