1. Dialogue: the Way Forward

The future offers two alternatives: death or dialogue. This statement is not over-dramatization. In the past it was possible, indeed, unavoidable, for most human beings to live out their lives in isolation from the vast majority of their fellows, without even having a faint awareness of, let alone interest in, their very existence. At most, and for most, the occasional tale with distorted descriptions of distant denizens whiled away their moments of leisure and satisfied their curiosity. Everyone for the most part talked to their own cultural selves. Even the rare descriptions of "the other" hardly ever came from "the other" themselves, but from some of their own who had heard, or heard of, "the other." Put briefly, until the edge of the present era, humans lived in the Age of Monologue. That age is now passing.

We are now poised at the entrance to the Age of Dialogue. We travel all over the globe, and large elements of the entire globe come to us. There can hardly be a U.S. campus which does not echo with foreign accents and languages. Our streets, businesses and homes are visibly filled with overseas products. We constantly hear about the crises of our massive trade deficit and the overwhelming debts second and third world countries owe us. Through our Asian-made television sets we invite into our living rooms myriads of people of strange nations, cultures and religions.

We can no longer ignore "The Other," but we can close our minds and spirits to them, look at them with fear and misunderstanding, come to resent them, and perhaps even hate them. This way of encounter leads to hostility and eventually war and death. For example, one of the fundamental reasons why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 was because the Japanese leadership perceived the U.S. moves as a basic economic threat to their well-being. The American response eventually was to drop atomic bombs on "the Japs," annihilating hundreds of thousands of human beings in two brief instants.

Today nuclear or ecological, or other, catastrophic devastation lies just a little ways further down the path of Monologue. It is only by struggling out of the self-centered monologic mindset into dialogue with The Other as s/he really is, and not as we have projected her/him in our monologues, that we can avoid such cataclysmic disasters. In brief: We must move from the Age of Monologue to the Age of Dialogue.

What we understand to be the "explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly," is what we call our religion or if that explanation is not based on a notion of the transcendent, we can call it an ideology. Since our religion or ideology is so comprehensive, so all-inclusive, it is the most fundamental area in which The Other is likely to be different from us and hence possibly seen as the most threatening. Again, this is not over-dramatization. The current catalogue of conflicts which have religion/ideology as a constituent element is staggering, including such obvious neuralgic flashpoints as Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Israel, Sri Lanka, Pakistan/India, Tibet, Afghanistan, the Sudan, Armenia/Azerbaijan. . . .

Hence, if humankind is to move from the Age of Monologue into the Age of Dialogue, the religions and ideologies must enter into the movement full force. They have in fact begun to make serious progress along this path, though the journey stretches far ahead, indeed.

It is precisely here that you in Grand Valley State University together with the network you contemplate establishing can make a serious contribution to the struggle of humankind along the uncharted path of dialogue.

As you start on this path let me offer you what assistance I can by pointing out what I and some of my colleagues have found to be some helpful guideposts along the way.

2. Dialogue: A Way of Thinking

Dialogue, especially dialogue in the religious and ideological area is not simply a series of conversations. It is a whole new way of thinking, a way of seeing and reflecting on the world and its meaning.

If I were speaking just to Christians, I would use the term "theology" to name what I am largely talking about here. But the dialogical way of thinking is not something peculiarly Christian. Rather, it is a way for all human beings to reflect on the ultimate meaning of life. Regardless whether one is a theist or not, whether one is given to using Greek thought categories, as Christians have been wont to do in their "theologizing," or not, dialogue is ever more clearly the way of the future in "religious and ideological reflection" on the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly.

I am convinced that it is necessary to try to think beyond the absolutes that I as a Christian and others in their own ways have increasingly found de-absolutized in our modern thought world. Hence, I would like to reflect with you on the ways all of us humans need to think about the world and its meaning now that more and more of us, both individually and even at times institutionally, are gaining enough maturity to notice that there are entire other ways of integrating an understanding of the world than the way we and our forebears grew up in.

Beyond the absolute way of understanding the world and its meaning for us, beyond the absolute way of thinking, we have begun to find a much richer, "truer," way of understanding the world the dialogical way of thinking. It is this dialogical way of thinking particularly in the area of religion and ideology that I intend to reflect on here.

My dialogue partners in this new paradigm of understanding the world are all the ways of understanding the world and its meaning the world's religions and ideologies. And so, we eventually need to engage in dialogue with at least the world's major religions and ideologies, reflecting on what we can learn about and from each other. But beyond all these dialogue partners is the often unconscious but always pervasive dialogue partner for me and an ever increasing number of contemporaries: modern critical thought.

Precisely those who are open to dialogue that is, are open to going beyond prior absolutes to learning from each other live in a de-absolutized, "relationized," modern critical-thinking thought world, a thought world wherein they no longer can live on the level of the first naivete, but are at least striving to live on the level of the second naivete. On this level they see their root symbols and metaphors as symbols and metaphors, and hence do not mistake them for empirical, ontological realities, but also do not simply reject them as fantasies and fairy tales. Rather, because they see them as root symbols and metaphors, they correctly appreciate them as indispensable vehicles to commun- icate profound realities that go beyond the capacity of everyday language to communicate.

3. Dialogue: Its Meaning

Dialogue is conversation between two or more persons with differing views, the primary purpose of which is for each participant to learn from the other so that he or she can change and grow of course, in addition both partners will also want to share their understanding with their partners. We enter into dialogue primarily so that we can learn, change and grow, not so that we can force change on the other.

In the past, when we encountered those who differed from us in the religious and ideological sphere, we did so usually either to defeat them as opponents, or to learn about them so as to deal with them more effectively. In other words, we usually faced those who differed with us in a confrontation sometimes more openly polemically, sometimes more subtly so, but usually with the ultimate goal of overcoming the other because we were convinced that we alone had the truth.

But that is not what dialogue is. Dialogue is not debate. In dialogue each partner must listen to the other as openly and sympathetically as possible in an attempt to understand the other's position as precisely and, as it were, as much from within, as possible. Such an attitude automatically assumes that at any point we might find the partner's position so persuasive that, if we were to act with integrity, we ourselves would have to change.

Until quite recently in almost all religious traditions, and certainly very definitely within Christianity, the idea of seeking religious or ideological wisdom, insight or truth through dialogue, other than in a very initial and rudimentary fashion, occurred to very few people, and certainly had no influence in the major religious or ideological communities. The further idea of pursuing religious or ideological truth through dialogue with other religions and ideologies was even less thinkable.

Today the situation is dramatically reversed. In 1964 Pope Paul VI's first encyclical focused on dialogue: "dialogue is demanded nowadays. . . . is demanded by the dynamic course of action which is changing the face of modern society. It is demanded by the pluralism of society and by the maturity man has reached in this day and age. Be he religious or not, his secular education has enabled him to think and speak, and to conduct dialogue with dignity."1 Further official words of encouragement came from the Vatican secretariat for dialogue with non-believers: "All Christians should do their best to promote dialogue . . . as a duty of fraternal charity suited to our progressive and adult age."2

4. Dialogue: Reasons for Its Rise

Why this dramatic change? Why should we pursue the truth in the area of religion and ideology by way of dialogue?

There are the many "external" factors that have appeared in the past century and a half which have contributed constitutively to the creation of what we today call the "global village." In the past the vast majority of people were born, lived and died all within the village or valley of their origin. Now, however, in many countries hundreds of millions of people have left their homes not only once or a few times, but do so frequently consequently experiencing customs and cultures other than their own. Moreover, the world comes to us through the mass media.

All these externals have made it increasingly impossible for Westerners, and then gradually everyone, to live in isolation. We meed "the other" willy nilly, and after two catastrophic world wars, a world depression and a threat of nuclear holocaust we are learning that our meeting can no longer be in indifference, for that leads to encounters in ignorance and prejudice, which is the tinder of hostility, and then violence. But if this violence leads to World War III, it will be the end of human history. Hence, for the sake of survival, meeting in dialogue and cooperation is the only alternative to global disaster.

The twentieth century global catastrophic events also had a profound impact on the Christian churches. Stanley Samartha, the first Director of the World Council of Churches' division on interreligious dialogue, noted that, "It is not without significance that only after the second world war (1945), when, with the dismantling of colonialism, new nations emerged on the stage of history and asserted their identity through their own religions and cultures, that both the Vatican and World Council of Churches began to articulate a more positive attitude toward the peoples of other religious traditions."3

5. Dialogue: A Paradigm-shift in Epistemology

Paralleling the rise of these extraordinary "external" factors was the rise of "internal" ones, which might be described succinctly as the even more dramatic shift in the understanding of the structure of reality and especially the understanding of truth that has taken place in Western civilization, and even beyond, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This shift has made dialogue not only possible but also necessary. Where such words as immutability, simplicity and monologue had largely characterized our Western understanding of reality in an earlier day, in the past 150 years mutuality, relationality and dialogue have come to be understood as constitutive elements of the very structure of our human reality. This substantive shift has been both very penetrating and broad, profoundly affecting both our understanding of what it means to be human and our systematic reflection on that meaning in traditional Christian terms, our "theologizing." It is important, therefore, to examine this enormous sea change in our understanding of reality and truth, this fundamental paradigm shift and the implications it has for our systematic reflection.

From a certain perspective, how we conceive the ultimate structure of the universe as either static or dynamic, for example is the most fundamental dimension of our human thought. Everything else is built upon and stems from it. Even those who claim to have no ultimate view of the universe, no metaphysics, do in fact have the most elusive kind of metaphysics, a covert one.

However, from another perspective, that of origin and development, it is how we understand our process of understanding and what meaning and status we attribute to our statements about reality in other words, our epistemology which is primary. It will profoundly determine how we conceive our view of the ultimate structure of reality, our metaphysics, what value we place on it and how we can use it. The same is true of everything else we perceive, conceive, and think of, and how we subsequently decide on things and act. For this reasons, the revolutionary changes in our understanding of our understanding, in our understanding of truth, that is, in our epistemology, that have occurred in the West since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment have been extremely pervasive and radically influential.

In the previous section (# 3. The Age of Global Dialogue), I noted that up through the past century the Western notion of truth was largely absolute, static and monologic or exclusive. It has since become deabsolutized, dynamic and dialogic, or in a word, "relational." This "new" view of truth came about in at least six different, but closely related, ways . . . and here it is worthwhile briefly listing them once again: 1. Historicism: truth is deabsolutized by the perception that reality is always described in terms of the circumstances of the time in which it is expressed. 2. Intentionality: Seeking the truth with the intention of acting accordingly deabsolutizes the statement. 3. Sociology of knowledge: truth is deabsolutized in terms of geography, culture, and social standing. 4. Limits of language: truth as the meaning of something and especially as talk about the transcendent is deabsolutized by the limited nature of human language. 5. Hermeneutics: all truth, all knowledge is seen as interpreted truth, knowledge, and hence is deabsolutized by the observer who is always also interpreter. 6. Dialogue: The knower engages reality in a dialogue in a language the knower provides, thereby deabsolutizing all statements about reality.

In short, our understanding of truth and reality has been undergoing a radical shift. This new paradigm which is being born understands all statements about reality, especially about the meaning of things, to be historical, intentional, perspectival, partial, interpretive and dialogic. What is common to all these qualities is the notion of relationality, that is, that all expressions or understandings of reality are in some fundamental way related to the speaker or knower.

As St. Thomas Aquinas stated, "Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower cognita sunt in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis."4 This is an interpretive view of truth, and it is clear that relationality pervades this hermeneutical, interpretative, view of truth.

6. Dialogue: A further development of this basic insight is that I learn not by being merely passively open or receptive to, but by being in dialogue with, extra-mental reality. I not only "hear" or receive reality, but I also and, I think, first of all "speak" to reality. I ask it questions, I stimulate it to speak back to me, to answer my questions. In the process I give reality the specific categories and language in which to respond to me. The "answers" that I receive back from reality will always be in the language, the thought categories, of the questions I put to it. It can "speak" to me, can really communicate with my mind, only in a language and categories that I understand.

When the speaking, the responding, grows less and less understandable to me, if the answers I receive are sometimes confused and unsatisfying, then I probably need to learn to speak a more appropriate language when I put questions to reality. If, for example, I ask the question, "How far is yellow?" of course I will receive a non-sense answer. Or if I ask questions about living things in mechanical categories, I will receive confusing and unsatisfying answers.

This is a dialogic view of truth, whose very name reflects its relationality.

With this new and irreversible understanding of the meaning of truth, the critical thinker has undergone a radical Copernican turn. Just as the vigorously resisted shift in astronomy from geocentrism to heliocentrism revolutionized that science, the paradigm shift in the understanding of truth statements has revolutionized all the humanities, including theology-ideology. The macro-paradigm with which critical thinkers operate today is characterized by historical, social, linguistic, hermeneutical, praxis and dialogic relational consciousness. This paradigm shift is far advanced among thinkers and doers; but as in the case of Copernicus, and even more dramatically of Galileo, there are still many resisters in positions of great institutional power.

Again, it should be stressed that with the deabsolutized view of the truth of the meaning of things, we come face to face with the specter of relativism, the opposite pole of absolutism. Unlike relationality, a neutral term which merely denotes the quality of being in relationship, relativism, like so many "isms," is a basically negative term. If it can no longer be claimed that any statement of the truth of the meaning of things is absolute, totally objective, because the claim does not square with our experience of reality, it is equally impossible to claim that every statement of the truth of the meaning of things is completely relative, totally subjective, for that also does not square with our experience of reality, and of course would logically lead to an atomizing isolation which would stop all discourse, all statements to others.

Our perception, and hence description, of reality is like our view of an object in the center of a circle of viewers. My view and description of the object, or reality, will be true, but it will not include what someone on the other side of the circle perceives and describes, which will also be true. So, neither of our perceptions and descriptions of reality is total, complete "absolute" in that sense or "objective" in the sense of not in any way being dependent on a "subject" or viewer. At the same time, however, it is also obvious that there is an "objective," doubtless "true" aspect to each perception and description, even though each is relational to the perceiver-"subject."

As I have previously observed, if we can no longer hold to an absolutist view of the truth of the meaning of things, we must take steps to make certain that we are not logically forced into the silence of total relativism. First, besides striving to be as accurate and fair as possible in gathering and assessing information and submitting it to the critiques of our peers and other thinkers and scholars, we must also to dredge out, state clearly, and analyze our own pre-suppositions a constant, ongoing task. Even in this of course we will be operating from a particular "standpoint."

Secondly, we must complement our constantly critiqued statements with statements from different "stand-points." That is, we need to engage in dialogue with those who have differing cultural, philosophical, social, religious viewpoints so as to strive toward an ever fuller perception of the truth of the meaning of things. If we do not engage in such dialogue we will not only be trapped within the perspective of our own "standpoint," but will now also be aware of our lack. We will no longer with integrity be able to remain deliberately turned in on ourselves. Our search for the truth of the meaning of things makes it a necessity for us as human beings to engage in dialogue. Knowingly to refuse dialogue today could be an act of fundamental human irresponsibility in Judeo-Christian terms, a sin.

6. Dialogue: Its Ground Rules

In interreligious, interideological dialogue, it is not suffi- cient to discuss a religious- ideological subject, that is, "the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly." The partners must come to the dialogue as persons significantly identified with a religious or ideological community. If I were neither a Christian nor a Marxist, for example, I could not participate as a partner in a Christian-Marxist dialogue, though I might listen in, ask some questions for information, and make some helpful comments. Of course, anyone who is not identified with a particular tradition can engage in a religious or ideological dialogue, but one simply would not call it an inter-religious or ideological dialogue.

In section immediately following (#5. The Dialogue Decalogue: Ground Rules for Interreligious, Intercultural Dialogue), I set forth some basic ground rules for authentic interreligious, intercultural and interideological dialogue. These are not theoretical rules from an ivory tower. They have been learned from hard experience: to ignore them is to diminish or destroy the dialogue.

Interreligious, interideological dialogue operates in three areas: the practical, where we collaborate to help humanity; the depth or "spiritual" dimension, where we attempt to experience the partner's religion or ideology "from within"; the cognitive, where we seek understanding and truth. Dialogue also has three phases. In the first phase, which we never completely outgrow, we unlearn misinformation about each other and begin to know each other as we truly are. In phase two we begin to discern values in our partner's tradition and wish to appropriate them into our own. If we are serious, persistent and sensitive enough in the dialogue, we may at times enter into phase three. Here we together begin to explore new areas of reality, of meaning, of truth aspects which neither or us had even been aware of before. We are brought face to face with these new, still unknown dimensions of reality through questions, insights, probings pro- duced in the dialogue. We will experience for ourselves that dialogue patiently pursued can become an instrument of new "re-velation," a further "un-veiling"

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NOTES

1. Ecclesiam suam, no. 9, as cited in Austin Flannery, Vatican Council II (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1975), p. 1003.

2. Humanae personae dignitatem, cited in ibid.

3. Stanley Samartha, "The Cross and the Rainbow. Christ in a Multireligious Culture," in: John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness. Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987), p. 79.

4.Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q. 1, a. 2.

 

Posted 1998; last revised December 2010 by Ingrid Shafer 
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