In: Moha Ennaji (ed.), Alliance des Cultures et des Religions pour la Paix, Fès: Centre Sud Nord, 2017, p.41-48 Theological contributions to interreligious peace Johan Goud (Utrecht University) Je veux bien commençer mon intervention par une courte délinéation en français. Le beau thème de ce forum est ‘l’alliance des Cultures et des Religions pour la Paix’. Je vais alors réfléchir sur ce qui me semble d’ȇtre une précondition essentielle de tous propos sur la paix: la critique de soi-mȇme, de sa propre tradition, de ses propres certitudes bien-aimées. Comme vous savez, l’Europe chrétien a été déchiré par des guerres de religion horribles, dans les seizième et dix-septième siècles – des guerres multiples, entre les catholiques et les protestants, mais aussi entre les protestants de différentes confessions: les luthériens, les calvinistes, et des autres. C’est tout à fait comparable avec les guerres impitoyables d’aujourdhui, entre les sunnites et les chiites. Après cet ȃge terrible il y a eu des découvertes diverses. La découverte, entre autres, d’une lecture herméneutique de la Bible et que la Bible est un livre comme des autres, écrit par des hommes, avec de maintes significations qui sont toutes vraies ou au moins défensibles. Les découvertes aussi des philosophes et des théologiens qui ont fièrcement critiqué les fausses prétentions des églises. Ils ont développé l’idéal de la tolérance interconfessionelle et interreligieuse – en commençant par une critique profonde de soi. Je vais présenter les idées de trois théologiens européens fameux: l’allemand Frédéric Schleiermacher, le suisse Karl Barth, l’anglais Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Je continuerai en anglais. As I said already in French, my contribution to this conference ties in with the concepts of interreligious peace and mutual understanding as suggested by the conference title. This brief paper concerns a question looming behind all issues of identity and understanding, namely: What makes intercultural or interreligious communication possible? What makes peace into what it should be? I shall explore how Christian theologians from the age of enlightenment onwards have dealt with influential critiques of religion in Europe. The efforts of e.g. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Karl Barth, to integrate these critical, often ironical theories within their own reflections on faith have revealed to be serious contributions to peace (in the interreligious as well as the political and societal senses). Their theological projects could inspire all seekers for peace between the different Abrahamic religions: Jews, Christians, Muslims. In a cercle of Christian theologians an example of blasphemic art passed around. The picture showed a serenously looking Christ. Besides him the universally known logo of Coca Cola. Underneath these both the text: ‘This is my blood’ – referring, of course, to the central Christian doctrine which says that man has been reconciled with God through the blood sacrifice of Christ. None of the theologians present there – representing various confessions – was shocked. On the contrary, some of them couldn’’t help laughing. How to explain that? Another theologian with whom, some weeks later, I debated on the Danish cartoons and the partly furious reactions from Islamic side, remarked that to his opinion Christians tend to accept everything. They are, he said, so impressed by dominant secularism, that nothing seems to affect them anymore. Is that true? To be honest: I don’t believe that. Forced by history. Christian theologians in Europe have developed self-critical and tolerant attitudes. Traditions of historical criticism and of religion critique have changed and to a certain extent enriched their ways of thinking and believing. To put it otherwise: these critical traditions have furthered their sense of humour. Ridiculed redemption Out of sheer necessity and gradually, Christian theologians developed more sense of humour, I said. Taken as a general statement this saying is incorrect, of course. It is not difficult to find many exceptions on the level of churchmen and individual believers. It is however characteristic of certain main trends and a few top theologians. Let me give three examples of them. They revealed to be sensitive to different kinds of criticism and internalized the relativizatioin of Christan faith and theology. At the end of the eightteenth century the German philosopher-theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote his famous ‘lectures for the well-educated despisers of religion’. He addressed himself to the romantic-minded intellectuals of his time, who refused to take the cause of religion seriously and considered it to be something for rude and uncivilized spirits. He tried to counter their critique by making acceptable that real religion moves man’s mind, ‘blends all functions of human soul into unity and sublimates all our activities in an admiring vision of the infinite’. After an elegant argument he concludes that the purest form of this inner vision has been conserved in Christianity. This does not sound very tolerant in an interreligious setting like this one. We have to keep in mind, however, that Schleiermacher wrote this in 1799 and should listen carefully to his ambiguous explanation. This ‘religion of religions’, so he writes, knows for certain that ‘the best proof of its eternity lies in its own sad history’ and that the Infinite can be seen (angeschaut) and adored in many different ways. A.w., p. 193 (oorspr. Duitse uitgave, p. 310-311). Remarkable is – in the second place – the theological reception of the antireligious ideas of the nineteenth philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the ‘Antichrist’ as he liked to characterize himself. His scornful comments on all that is ‘human, all too human’ and his proclamations of ‘the death of God’ and of self transcending humanity or ‘Übermensch’, underwent a theological transformation in the thought of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who certainly was the most influential Christian theologian of the twentieth century. He integrated these Nietzschean ideas in his revolutionary commentary on St Paul’s ‘Epistle to the Romans’ (1922). The most suffocating and strangling shape of the ‘human, all too human’ is religion, so Barth. Jesus, he adds, liberates man from this religious trapnet by living a purely natural life, devoid of all pretence. Thinking along these lines, Barth construed a separation between religion, that highly ambiguous phenomenon with all its illusions and man-made constructions, and faith. Some twenty years later, it was the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, in his cell in a national-socialist prison, wrote in this same spirit that we should learn to be pious in a completely worldly, non-religious way, ‘fromm … als wären wir es nicht’. Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (2de druk, 1922), Zürich 1978, p. 220-221. Schleiermacher’s lectures are tastefully but seriously written, Barth’s commentary is characterized by a tone of irony which takes nothing for granted. Very funny are the essays of the English author Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1908). In them he describes how the atheism of Huxley and Spencer created ‘the first wild doubt on doubting’ in his mind. G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxie (1908), Kampen 2001, p. 113. Unforeseeably and against their own intentions, they converted him to an orthodox version of Christan belief. This religion affected him positively, so he writes, by its way of doing justice to the paradoxes of human existence. Classical philosophy seeks virtuousness in the ideal of a superior balance. Christianity, on the contrary, places virtue in a zone of conflict, in the collision of conflicting emotions. It is a religion of crusaders and of saints, the first extremely violent, the second extremely gentle, ‘gentle to a nearly improper degree’. It is in other words the religion of the ‘extreme excessivities balancing each other out’. ‘Both emotions are free because they are kept in place.’ A.w., p. 128, 130. Reasoning by paradoxes is deeply rooted in the history of the Christian faith. We find it in the biblical Epistles of Saint Paul and in the writings of the second-century churchfather Tertullian, to mention only two of the oldest examples. The paradoxality of law and grace, humility and glory, cross and resurrection, obstructed from the beginning until now the aspirations of systematizing theologians. At many moments in the history of Christianity these obstacles received specific meaning; anti-systematic patterns of thought arose and became flowering. In the last centuries in particular, shapes of ‘paradoxical theology’ were influential. We saw some examples in the highly selfcritical thought, pronouncing both yes and no, of Schleiermacher, Barth, Bonhoeffer and Chesterton. Other examples could be added. The paradoxes made it possible both to integrate and to refute the massive criticism against church and theology, in the ages of enlightenment, atheism and scientific rationality. The purpose of this small survey is clear, I hope. In the last centuries selfcriticism has become a stilistic principle of theological thought. This made it possible to integrate criticism and ridicule in one’s own theological reflections. This led to all sorts of paradoxical theology, saying both yes and no to the dogmatical and institutional tradition of Christianity. For dogmatic theologians this implied the task to rediscover and to reinterpret, again and again, faith in the Crucified, as a refutation – coming from within – of Christian triumphalism. Inevitably this had consequences for the way of coping with criticism, ridicule and slander coming from outside. The focus of attention had to shift from the supposed slanderer to the believer considering himself slandered and feeling indignant. Didn’t he unjustly identify the Infinite with the Church and its institutionalized faith (so Schleiermacher); didn’t he reduce Christian faith to a kind of selfmade religion (so Karl Barth), had he really understood the almost uncontrollable excessivity of his own tradition (so Chesterton) ? All these questions tended into the same direction. Whoever interprets the irony and ridicule of others as attempts to slander the honour of the biblical God and of Jesus Christ, might make a fatal mistake. He or she needs, first of all, to investigate him- or herself. Perhaps he is confusing God’s with his own identity and dignity. ‘Nobody lies more than the indignant’, Nietzsche wrote. A reflection of moral nature What makes peace into what it should be? Let us recall the question from which we started. In a first, more lengthy consideration I discussed the peculiar inclination of modern Christian theology to incapsulate the criticisms of enlightened and atheist philosophers. Self-criticism, I said, has become a stylistic quality of modern theology. I like to add a shorter second consideration, of a more ethical nature. It concerns the value of a pluralist way of looking at your own view of life and of a free, comparative debate about it. Liberal democracy makes highly complicated demands on our ability to really understand ourselves and others. We should learn to distinguish private from public rationality: what for me is a holy and unshakable truth, is no more than one of many poossible convictions in a societal context. Or to put it in Platonic concepts: we should learn to consider our own belief as both a truth and an opinion. It is as good as impossible to claim public reverence for it. More than that: the collision of opinions isn’t only inevitable but also valuable. To a certain extent the ideal of peace and the ability to engage in the conflict of opinions belong together. In his classical discourse on freedom (1859) the British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that the free market of ideas is essential for the process of finding truth. It means that ideas that are evidently false, should freely be brought to expression. They help to prevent that so-called true beliefs become nothing more than dead doctrines, simply because they are never called into question and never challenged in a free and fearless debate. This ideal of a free market of ideas is sometimes criticized by ethicists and social philosophers. They point at the disbalances of power on this free market. People who feel hurted and indignant, often already belong to the lower strata of society, they say. Offensive expressions on the so-called free market of ideas could further an ongoing process of exclusion. In particular communities representing a minority culture – as is the case with islamic communities in the European context – could be seriously frustrated in their inclusion in liberal societies and in the construction of their own identity within these societies. This is of course a real and always threatening risk. In marginal situations in which serious discrimination is looming, weak minorities have to be protected by all legal and moral means. Alertness is always necessary, the ‘readiness is all’. But a society that gives all its inhabitants, minorities included, the right to freely express themselves, has by doing that already considerably diminished this risk. And there is another important issue asking for reflection. Living in a free society requires the development of an essential competence. It is the ability to take advantage of the right to free expression of your fellow-men, in spite of the offences – intended or not intended – following from that right for you personally. I simply recall two quotations mentioned before. The poignant dictum by Nietzsche – painful for believers of all confessions – saying that ‘nobody lies more than the indignant’. In the second place John Stuart Mill’s assertion that the free expression of false ideas is essential for the process of finding truth. I return to the questions with which I began this brief essay: What makes intercultural or interreligious communication possible? What makes peace into what it should be? In line with my preceding argument I like to underscore the following two conclusions. First of all, we should pay close attention to our own cultural conventions – the beloved ones included – and our own theories and practices of faith, with their impressive and their less appealing aspects. In the second place we should intend genuine dialogue, the kind that seeks insight and does not shy away from self-critique. It would be an opportunity lost if the formulation of universal concepts like peace and understanding were to distract us from the hard work of engaging in this self-critical dialogue. A perfectly democratic and open dialogue might be unattainable. Striving for it is an exercice de la patience, which is a beautiful French expression, requiring two things of those who are longing and seeking for peace: to be patient, at the same time not forgetting to exercise our mind and our spirit as intensely as we are able to, looking for tiny possibilities of peace. 5