Abstract
Earlier this year I travelled to Jerusalem for the 60th anniversary celebration of the Swedish Theological Seminary. I was invited to give a keynote lecture as part of the opening event to a mixed audience of Jews, Christians and Muslims as well as various dignitaries from the area and indeed from Sweden; the respondent was a Jewish Bible scholar. The title of my lecture was ‘Monotheism and the dialectics of love and law’ and the fundamental question it posed is how did Judaism and Islam become defined as ‘religions of law’ and Christianity a ‘religion of love’? The problematics of love and law lie primarily in the fact that in both Islam and Judaism the outsider sees law largely through a prism of ritualism in opposition to the ethical. Law is the external, the public and the ceremonial whereas true spiritualism or true morality is to be found in the internal, the unstructured, the emotional and the personal.
At the end of the lecture, an older gentleman stood up and spoke quite angrily about why I had made the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God of the Qur’an the same. Furthermore, how could I stand so near to East Jerusalem and speak of divine love without paying any attention to what was happening only a few miles away? The absence of any kind of love between the faith communities was clearly evident to him. What does it mean to talk of a loving God in the midst of this conflict where people act with indifference or hate while happily making profound theological statements about a loving God?
It is true that the theological and the political are linked. In defining how we think of God, we also define our own relationship to God as well as the relationship between people who think and act in the name of God. The theology of a loving God must translate into the politics of a loving God because theology is not just about reflecting on the world, it is fundamentally about mending the world. Belief in God demands an obligation to talk of God in a way that is meaningful to people’s lives otherwise theological constructs become little more than clever concepts. God can neither be limited nor compromised by political issues but nor can we ignore the fact that when we say the word God we say something very powerful; the word itself moves us.
Context is everything. In her Diamond Jubilee year, one of the Queen’s first formal engagements was her visit to Lambeth Palace where she addressed people of many faiths in the presence of Archbishop Rowan Williams. Her speech about the contributions of different religious communities to the cultural landscape of the UK was thoughtful but I was moved by her phrase, ‘Prince Philip and I wish to send our good wishes, through you, to each of your communities, in the hope that – with the assurance of the protection of our established Church – you will continue to flourish and display strength and vision in your relations with each other and the rest of society.’ The protection of the Church struck a chord with many who felt that the phrase, even if a symbolic gesture, united people. Privileged discussions don’t necessarily translate into peace but sometimes words are enough; they carry the moment towards a higher goal.
In conflict ridden areas, action is everything. In peaceful societies, words matter not because lives are at stake but because how we speak of our faith says something about ourselves and more importantly about our stake in society.