how Christians should relate to Muslims (hint, rhymes with 'dove')

Answering the question "How should Christians relate to other religions" ought to be the easiest thing in the world. But it has been made difficult because people typically try to answer the question without first taking two very important facts into consideration.

The first fact was put this way by Karl Barth, maybe the most influential theologian of the 20th century: humans are “idol factories.” Our brains are like well functioning assembly lines in the business of manufacturing false gods. These range from the obvious and easily dismissible (e.g. when the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep IV decided one day that the sun was a god named Aten), to the less obvious but, for that reason, more powerful (e.g. money, power, status, our family or tribal identity), to what we consider to be the very opposite of an idol, and for that reason the most powerful, our religions (e.g. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism). You might be reading this thinking, “Well, yes, their religion is clearly idolatrous but not mine.” I won’t argue with you on that. But for our purposes here, put that aside and just assume that even if the one true religion were handed to us on a silver platter tomorrow by the one true God, it would be a matter of seconds before we confused the religion with the God who gave it to us. Voilà, right at that moment, we will have turned the one true religion into an idol.   

Why do people create idols? Too quickly, we might assume that it’s because we’re bad. The more fundamental answer is that it's because we're scared. An idol is simply whatever we entrust our lives to that will ultimately let us down. We create idols because the universe is dark and scary, and we either need to distract ourselves from that fact entirely or trick ourselves into believing we have an “in” that will get us out of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Not a bad way to get by, if ignorance is bliss, except that deep down we know we’re lying to ourselves. Easy not to acknowledge it though once “religion” has glommed onto a bunch of haphazard associations in our minds like “good,” “nice,” and “righteous.” Once that has happened, we can’t for the life of us figure out why such and such religion shouldn’t be synonymous with “God” and “truth.”

The second reason that I believe our thinking is hazy when it comes to religions engaging each other has to do with the fact that, as Euro-Americans we have a reflexive distrust of simile and metaphor and all things poetic. This is a problem because, while I may be able to relate to an object by observing it, testing its properties, drawing conclusions about its make-up, relationship with a subject requires poetry. I can describe to you that my wife’s eyes are brown, but on its own, this would be an emotionally neutral fact that could do nothing whatever to demonstrate why I love her. I love her because the brown of her eyes moves me as the stone around the mouth of a cave causes one to wonder at the unfathomable mysteries within. Poetry helps me to articulate the finally ineffable power of staring into my wife’s eyes even as I recognize that she is more than the metaphor and that it breaks down eventually. In its place, it allows me to express why I love her, but it would express something quite the opposite were I to call it an objective fact that her irises are made of stone or that her head is hollow. Obviously, to do so would be to make the absurd leap from poetry to science.

But we do this all the time in our religions and no one bats an eye. What the new-age pluralist, atheist, and fundamentalist all have in common is that they all take with solemn seriousness, whether in the accepting or rejecting of it, a certain pseudo-scientific view of God. So long as they insist on taking their “science” with ultimate seriousness, none of them can ever be in loving, trusting relationship with God, the absolute subject. A subject must always be free to upset our predictions about him or her.

           

So religion, wrongly understood, is an idol, but religion rightly understood, is the poetry, the forms and figures of speech through which we grapple with a mystery. There is still cognitive content in any poem. Otherwise, there would be no common understanding of what the words on the page mean. But just defining its words will hardly even hint at the poem’s deeper significance.

I understand that many, in our pseudo-scientific culture, will tend to see the word “metaphor” as a demotion for religion (though presumably only for their own religion). But anyone who has ever been in love will know otherwise. They will at once recognize that where science deals in truths, only poetry can point us toward the Truth. And the love-struck can also accept that, not only do all metaphors break down after a point, they do nothing whatever to give us control over the mysterious reality to which they point. Metaphors are tools for apprehending the power of reality, but as sure as my wife is not made of stone, metaphors are not the reality itself. Only by idolatrously elevating my own metaphors (my religion) for God to the same level of ultimacy as God in God’s own self can I insist that there be no other metaphors.

This brings us full circle. We are idolatry factories—well-oiled machines in the business of elevating our religious constructions to the level of gods. Sometimes people take this so far that, ironically, they get very comfortable making the most complex assertions about how “Christianity” should relate to “Buddhism” but can scarcely even conceptualize something as simple as Christ relating to a Buddhist (as if it were any more clear how he should relate to a 1^st century Jew or Pagan, as he had to do many times in his life). If I can keep my own construction of choice, Christianity, in its place, then I will never make the idolatrous mistake of substituting its creeds and confessions for real, unpredictable living God.

This makes interreligious dialogue much simpler. Because I can too easily get from “I understand God” to “therefore, you don’t,” but there is no way to get from “I’m in relationship with God” to “therefore, you’re not.”