I echo Sarah’s comments below – for the hope that this blog can become a space for open and frank discussion about the effect interfaith work has on our personal faith journeys and provide encouragement for us along the way. As the ‘used-to-be-evangelical’ referred to by Sarah, I was unsure whether I was entitled to contribute to a blog for ‘Evangelicals in Interfaith’. However, having had Christoph’s blessing over a coffee last week, I am pleased to be able to take part in the discussion!
I am aware that part of the anxiety for evangelicals in getting involved with interfaith work is about the effect it may have on the faith of their fellow believers. I, in turn, am anxious that by contributing to this blog I may not help diminish those evangelical anxieties! However, I do firmly believe that a true and living faith in the creator God can only really be so if it is capable of engaging in open and honest discussion about challenging questions and experience. Furthermore, what I have found is that even though encountering interfaith has often challenged my faith so deeply that I am not sure whether I actually believe in it anymore, the flip side is that my moments of faith now are far richer and deeper than I could previously have imagined.
Possibly the closest I have come to being able to ‘reconcile’ the impact of encountering other faiths and holding onto my own Christian faith in the last few years followed on from reading a passage in Kenneth Cragg’s book where he explains the Christian view of the Trinity. The part that is relevant here is his description of the first two members of the Trinity, the Father and the Son. He explains how Jesus’ disciples would have been staunch mono-theists, in line with their Jewish tradition. Like the Muslim belief, to associate any partners to him or suggest that the one true God could become human, would have been blasphemy of the highest order.
However, the gospels tell the story of how these mono-theists were increasingly perplexed as they encountered a person who defied their assumptions about God. Who on earth is this person who forgives sins, calms the winds and the waves and gives sight to the blind? They can’t make sense of it because it is so beyond their understanding of how God works. Only after years of following him can they start to comprehend that perhaps this man could indeed be God, and they only become more assured after the resurrection. It takes decades, if not centuries, for a semblance of a doctrine about the Trinity to emerge after this. At that moment before, when this group of mono-theistic disciples stand in utter confusion about how to reconcile their Jewish belief in God with their encounter with Jesus, they can not properly explain it, but they have a deep conviction that somehow God is at work there.
And in some way this is how I have come to feel about my encounter with people of other faiths. I try to hold onto a belief that Jesus is the only full revelation of God but am confronted by stories of the integrity of the Prophet Mohammed and his claims to have received God’s final revelation. And this final revelation continues to inspire many of my Muslim friends and colleagues to devote their lives to seeking justice, serving the poor and oppressed and worshipping one God. The theological clarity of Islam and the deep spirituality of my dear Muslim friends has at times drawn me near to a place where I feel I have no choice but to embrace it as my own faith. Resisting this has often resulted in me not feeling able to have a theology which isn’t entirely pluralist, which in turn starts to undermine the faith I try to have in Jesus as I have been conditioned to believe that true Christian faith and pluralism can’t mix.
So at present, the best I can do is reflect on Cragg’s story of the first disciples and feel something of the same bewilderment; I have a tradition instilled in me that equates Christianity as the only true faith, yet I sense and observe a deep and inspiring faith and spirituality in my Muslim, and more recently Jewish, friends. Like the first disciples in the days around Jesus’ death and resurrection, I have no theological structure to understand how faith in the Christian God can coexist with the incredible spirit I see in Muslims and Jews, but my faith and hope is that somehow, beyond my current comprehension, they can and do.
Andy Pring, Cohesion Project Officer (Youth Worker) at Wandsworth Borough Council
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