17.10.2017
Encounter is the Catalyst for Inter Faith Dialogue – Archbishop Addresses Council of Christians and Jews
The Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) is celebrating its 75th anniversary this month. The year–long celebrations began today (Tuesday October 17) with an address by the Archbishop of Dublin, The Most Revd Dr Michael Jackson, at CCJ’s AGM at St John’s Wood Synagogue in London.
The Archbishop focussed on encountering ‘The Other’. He said respect for The Other was what enabled people of distinct faiths engage in encounters with one another. Today’s mass migrations were once again bringing people together who might not otherwise have met, he said adding: “Neutral territory and public space have become contested once again in ways that are all too familiar to Jewish people in history and today”.
He said it was fashionable to blame social media for the slide towards a loss of respect for human dignity. But he explained that diminishment and demonisation of The Other were ancient human instincts.
“The Jewish people have consistently been the recipients of this diminishment as, in the early twentieth century and before The Shoah, were the Armenians. Encounter, storytelling and truth–telling for us together (and the leap is not easy nor can it ever be automatic or taken for granted) make the journey between the dialogue of life and the dialogue of ideas possible in such a way as to respect the experience and analyse the ideas. This also draws us into the relationship between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Encounter is the catalyst in giving us a wide room in which to combine both forms of dialogue. The one thing about life is that it is not ordinary. Life as we know it is powerfully influenced by the ideologies that surround it; they in turn can readily become popular philosophies and equally popular distortions. Life as we know it is also sacred; we are, as Genesis constantly reminds us, made in God’s image and God’s likeness (Genesis 1.26, 27),” Archbishop Jackson stated.
He said being an Inter Faith partner required being true to yourself and then being true to others. He suggested the principle could be expressed as: “Finding the self in God and in The Other” and said it was a principle of faith, trust, humanity, community, vulnerability and glory.
“At its most basic, identity therefore is relational and moves on from being individual. It continues all the time to be personal but with a dynamic and moving emphasis and focus. And as social beings we are creators of community – but always with the capacity for destruction of community,” the Archbishop said.
Aggressive and intolerant forms of believing and belonging were growing worldwide, he said. Similarly, governments worldwide were looking at the place of religion in public life and governments and religions were thinking of the scope of human rights as well as religious freedom.
“Religion and culture, to the surprise of secular policy makers with overwhelmingly materialist presuppositions and often unwarranted globalised models of community, are public markers of identity and all the more precious as people are forcibly deprived of material security and continuity by enforced emigration and immigration,” Archbishop Jackson said.
Three pairs of words – Presence and Engagement, Sending and Abiding, Embassy and Hospitality – represented involvement and receptivity in the expression of the Christian Faith and the Anglican tradition among Others to whom we ourselves are Other, he said.
“Presence and Engagement expresses our commitment to be a stable presence in each place, to sanctify the life of the local community through both prayer and witness… Sending and Abiding and Embassy and Hospitality work together as a recognition of initiative and responsibility in our journey of faith and in the setting of all of this expression in the context of others who are already there,” the Archbishop added.
“All of the above is, of course, work in progress. I should like to argue that it is entirely compatible with the Christian faith; that, in its honesty of intention, it offers itself as open to criticism and refinement on a daily basis by those of Other Faiths and also to engagement around truth claims that are rightly and rigorously to be tested against the Canons of Humanity and the requirement to love God and love our neighbour as we love ourselves and, dare I add, wish ourselves to be loved by others,” he added.