Local congregations: Engaging neighbors of other faiths

Recasting the Good Samaritan

In the gospel, the answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?” is critical. After all, it was Jesus who inseparably linked the command to love God with the command to love the neighbor as oneself. These twin commands, Jesus says, are the essential response required of all who seek to inherit eternal life. Thus, “Who is my neighbor?” is not an idle question in the Christian faith.

Those familiar with the gospels will know that this question was asked of Jesus in the context of a debate with a scholar of the law. Jesus’ response as recorded in the Gospel of Luke is the story we know as the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). What must have originally been a narrative with tremendous shock value has largely become quite tame to its modern hearers. One reason is its familiarity and the dumbing down of the story simply to equate the Samaritan with a “do-gooder.” The more important reason, however, is that time has dimmed the scandal of the choice of the Samaritan as the hero of the story.

To understand the scandal of the story as originally told one must understand the history of division between Jews and Samaritans in Jesus’ day. The Samaritans were the descendants of the people of Israel left behind after the Assyrians had overpowered and destroyed the kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE. Through the years, these “left-behinds” intermarried with foreigners who settled in the land. After the return of the Jews from Babylon and the rebuilding of the temple led by Nehemiah, the enmity and separation between Samaritans and Jews grew through the years. Consequently, Samaritans in Jesus’ day were despised and treated as enemies.

Jesus’ parable, therefore, scandalizes in two ways. First, it is a story of a person stepping across the chasm of enmity and distrust to do good to an enemy who is the Other. One can read into “the other” many forms of distinction such as class, race, nationality, or religion that create in some people fear and a loathing to help. Yet, if that were the only point of the parable, why would Jesus not simply have told it as the story of a Jew who came across a wounded Samaritan and reacted with courage, compassion, and generosity? Such an anecdote with their co-religionist as the hero would certainly have played much better with his audience, even as it challenged them to consider the Samaritan, the “other,” as neighbor.

The second and larger scandal is that Jesus does the unthinkable. He chooses as the hero not a Jew, but a Samaritan, the enemy whose religion is considered flawed and despised. Jesus has the effrontery to lift up the “anything-but-good” Samaritan in the eyes of his audience as the ethical example they are to emulate in their lives. This was the double scandal—a Samaritan could be good and do good.

To regain the scandal of Jesus’ story in our context, we need literally to recast it for our time and place. Today, Jesus would undoubtedly hold before us the story of the Good Muslim and the double scandal of the “anything-but-good” Muslim who is good and does good. As it did in its original context, this story shatters any prejudgment that people of other faiths are not good and can do no good. Indeed, especially in the propensity to despise Muslims and disparage their faith in response to the terroristic acts of ISIS/ISIL and others, Jesus’ casting of the Samaritan as hero and ethical example reminds us that to be a follower of Jesus does not require one to deny that others can be good or do good in order to honor him. On the contrary, if we take the scandal of the story of the Good Samaritan seriously, we as Christians will humbly acknowledge that Muslims often outshine us in their capacity for courage and compassion and moreover serve as an example of what it means to fulfill the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

When the Baptist World Alliance was debating how to respond to the generous invitation of the Muslim community to dialogue, the tipping point in the conversation came when an Indonesian Baptist pastor recounted the courage of his Muslim neighbors toward his family. He shared that when radical fundamentalist Muslims entered his village and sought to stir up violence against Christians, his Muslim neighbors surrounded his home and church, standing between his family and those seeking to do them harm.

One creator, one humanity

A second resource for community shared across the Abrahamic religious traditions is the understanding that there is one creator and, therefore, one humanity. A recent international dialogue between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious leaders addressed the question of the basis we have for cooperation with one another. The response of each, out of their own scriptures, was that we share a common humanity as children of the same God. Hence, we owe one another mutual respect, dignity, and the capacity to flourish in community with one another.

Congregations that reach out to their neighbors of other faiths in an effort to build understanding and to work for the common good of their community discover the shared humanity that binds us together. Sitting with one another over meals, talking of family, speaking of aspirations and hopes for one’s children and one’s self, sharing in loss, participating together in doing good such as a Habitat for Humanity build—all these shared activities reinforce the ways in which we are alike and build bonds of friendship and mutual commitment.

This discovery can happen even in the midst of the most anguishing situations, as American Baptists in the Kansas City area discovered. As part of an emphasis on Baptist–Muslim dialogue by the American Baptist Churches USA, Central Baptist Seminary in Kansas City agreed to sponsor one such dialogue in the metropolitan Kansas City area. Months of preparations were involved. Little did they know as they planned, however, that the dialogue was set for the Saturday after the bombing at the Boston Marathon. In the midst of the tensions, some felt that the dialogue ought to be canceled, but wise opinions prevailed, insisting that precisely because of the fear and tension it was critical to move forward with the event as planned. That Saturday Baptists and Muslims came together—doctors, teachers, ministers, imams, truck drivers, nurses, farmers—as people who lived, worked, played, and prayed in the same geographical area. Theoretical discourse quickly was forgotten. In its place came the practical, down-to-earth, shared-humanity questions such as: “What are you telling your children about this event, because your children and my children go to the same school and we do not want them to live in fear of each other or fight each other.” “Do we understand that we both denounce terrorism whenever it is perpetrated against either of our communities?” “Can we commit to living together as neighbors whose well-being depends upon each other?” In this difficult conversation, they came to reaffirm their unity in a common humanity they shared. After all, here were Christian teachers who taught Muslim students in their public-school classrooms and encouraged them in pursuing their dreams through education. Further, here were Muslim physicians who daily addressed the health needs of Christian patients and sought their physical well-being. Indeed, here were mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, who understood the love each had for his or her children.

Within the United States this affirmation of our common humanity has crystallized in an effort known as “Shoulder to Shoulder.” This effort is a coalition of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who are committed to countering Islamophobia in the United States and the persecution of Christians and other minority religions in Muslim-majority countries. The past two election cycles in the United States have given rise to much anti-Muslim language by candidates, including proposals to restrict their basic liberties within our country. Against this torrent of fear and reaction, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders have stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the basis of a shared humanity and the respect for the rights of all to counter hate speech and actions. Likewise, in response to attacks within the United States and abroad, these same leaders have stood together in denouncing violence in the name of God by ISIS and its counterparts.

The affirmation of our common humanity and our community through our creation by the one God has the powerful capacity to evoke empathy and respect for neighbors who do not share the same faith, culture, language, or race, but share a more primal unity as one in creation.

Reaffirming love

To the foundational understanding of our shared humanity with others, the Christian gospel adds love as its most creative and empowering resource for building community. Love is central to Christian anthropology and sociology because we confess that the very nature of God revealed in Christ is that God is love. By this we do not simply mean that “God does loving things,” as true and wonderful as that is. The revelation of God in Christ as the Trinity is far more radical than this affirmation. Because God exists eternally as One-in-Three/Three-in-One, the very nature of God’s intrinsic self is love. God not only does loving things, for unlike any creature which acts lovingly, God alone is love.

For Christians, the depth of God’s love is most fully revealed in Jesus’ willingness to undergo sacrifice on the cross. Here, God’s sacrificial love reaches across enemy lines, as the Apostle Paul attests when he writes, “For, if while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life” (Rom 5:10)! This, then, is the motivational source of the narrative of the Good Samaritan: love reaches to even the other who is defined as enemy. Therefore, it can be said that in Christ there is no “other,” only a “neighbor” who is to be cherished and loved.

The creative power of love expresses itself on the cross, which redefines our relationship to God and each other as the beloved. Its power is manifested in Christians in the Middle East who choose love over hate and trust in God over fear. The response of the Baptist community in Lebanon to the overwhelming number of Syrian refugees who have fled there is inspirational. This small community of Christians is in the forefront of efforts to feed, clothe, house, and care for the predominantly Muslim flow of refugees into Lebanon. The aid they give is unconditional. To receive it, one is not required to be Christian; all that is required is to be in need. When asked how and why they do this, the Lebanese Christians reply that this is the way of Jesus and, therefore, their way.

Throughout the Middle East, the Christian community offers love as its response to violence and destruction. In so doing, it courageously offers a path out of the way of death that pervades the life of the region. The Dahers are a Palestinian Christian family who live on land that is increasingly threatened by hostile Israeli settlers. They have been subjected to threats, the destruction of their olive groves, and the attempted seizure of the land they have owned and on which their family has lived since the early 1900s. How easy it would be to hate under such circumstances. But the Dahers live the narrative of love as they seek justice and peace in the face of these continuing attacks upon them. One form their active resistance takes is to offer international summer peace camps on their property. As they live in the way of the sacrificial love of the cross they live for the redemption of the Middle East.

The Common Word

Some Muslims have also made significant contributions toward community between our two communities of faith. The first was in an invitation to dialogue addressed to global Christians in the document, “A Common Word between Us and You.” Drawing its title from a phrase in the Koran, “A Common Word,” as it is now known, states: “Thus in obedience to the Holy Qur’an, we as Muslims invite Christians to come together with us on the basis of what is common to us, which is also what is most essential to our faith and practice: the Two Commandments of love.” ³ The text cites the danger that the enmity between our two religious bodies poses to the world as its impetus for a call to dialogue: “Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.” ⁴ They continue, “The basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbor. These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity.” ⁵

In its response, the Baptist World Alliance (BWA) warmly embraced the call to dialogue proffered by the Muslim community. It commended the writers for “your conviction that it is only the movement of human hearts and minds towards love and worship of the One God, creator of us all, that will begin to resolve the huge needs for peace, justice and love of neighbors in our world today. Your letter, then, is not only creative but timely.” ⁶ The BWA letter to the Muslim community continues: “We want to say ‘yes’ to your invitation to ‘come together’ with you to live in peace, respect and kindness. We wish to collaborate with you, wherever possible, in local projects for peace, justice and the giving of aid to those who are suffering and in need. And we do agree with you that future dialogue between us can be based on the ‘common ground’ of our obedience, within our own faiths, to the double love command, together with our fundamental confession of the unity of God.” ⁷

The authors of the BWA response also clarified what they meant by “common ground” while also reaffirming the “double love command” as sufficient for Muslims and Christians to enjoin one another in efforts of mutual understanding and work for the common welfare of all peoples:

In saying all this with a full heart, however, we want to clarify what we mean by saying that we have a ‘common ground’ in the commandments to love God and our neighbour. We do not understand it to mean that this double command is the sum total of our two faiths: we do not think that the whole range of our beliefs about the relation between God and the world He creates and redeems can be reduced to this double command. We do not even need to assume at the beginning of our dialogue that we mean exactly the same thing by “love of God” and “love of neighbor.” Rather, we understand “common ground” to mean that this double command to love opens up a space or area (“ground”) in which we can live together, talk with each other, share our experiences, work together to enable the flourishing of human life and explore the eternal truths to which our respective faiths bear witness … Moreover, this common ground is not just a strategy for dialogue, but a gift of God to us all. In the end, it is God who gives the ground on which we stand, and God who opens up the space in which we can meet. ⁸

The language of the response is rich in promise as it welcomes this common ground as a space for dialogue and work for the flourishing of all. Furthermore, it makes clear that this is to be the work not of an elite few but of all within our faith communities, and it cites one particular way we can strive to inhabit this common ground:

It is, however, too easy to keep a dialogue going at the high level of theological conversation alone. Somehow the theological vision which enlivens us must be received at the grassroots and change attitudes and prejudices there. Somehow the members of our communities need to be gripped by the value of respect and honor for all people because of the creation of all by the One God, and because of His love and mercy towards them, however wrong the beliefs of others may seem.

Just one way this may happen is for religious teachers in both faiths to be careful about the rhetoric they use, which may have unintended effects on followers who are less aware of theological nuances, and which may even lead to violence. To be concrete, we have one suggestion for Baptist Christians, that they avoid words to describe evangelism (or telling the Gospel story) which appear threatening to others, such as “evangelistic crusades.” Nor is it necessary to be critical of another faith in order to commend what we believe to be true in ours; the story of Jesus has power to persuade in its own right. It is easy to slip into a violent rhetoric which arouses unpleasant memories of conflicts in the past. We do not venture to suggest examples of unhelpful rhetoric to you, our Muslim friends, but hope that you might be able to identify some for yourselves. Let our rhetoric be that of love, as you have already shown. ⁹

Both “A Common Word” and the Baptist World Alliance response support our two faith communities doing the hard work of reconciliation and peace-building for the sake of the common good.

The Marrakesh Declaration

A second contribution by Muslim scholars and leaders also provides new resources in our work for peace. Known as “The Marrakesh Declaration,” this document is the result of several years of diplomacy and scholarship by Muslim scholars, led by Shaykh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, President of the Forum for Peace in Abu Dhabi. The goal of this initiative was to secure the rights of Christians and followers of all religions other than Islam for full religious liberty and citizenship in Muslim-majority countries. This effort has been important, given the reality that Christians in Muslim-majority countries, who are marginalized socially, politically, and economically because of their faith, are fleeing the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity, in the hope of a life free from religious discrimination.

“The Marrakesh Declaration” makes several significant contributions. It is an effort to ground the rights of Christians and others upon the Koran and the teaching of Mohammed. It has done so by highlighting statements in the Koran such as, “There shall be no compulsion in religion” (Surah Al-Baqarah 256) and “If Allah had pleased He would have made you a single people, but that He might try you in what He gave you. So vie one with another in virtuous deeds” (Surah al-Ma’ida 5:48). The “Declaration” is also based on the treaty Mohammed created between the warring tribes of Medina, known variously as the Constitution or Charter of Medina. In this charter, Mohammed affirms the rights of tribes that are Jewish, not Muslim.

“The Marrakesh Declaration,” citing these precedents in Muslim sacred scriptures and history, sets forth the following initiatives:

It is important to note that the “Declaration” affirms both the rights of citizenship of Christians and others, condemns religion as a tool of violence, and in the prologue notes the basis for supporting religious liberty: the 1,400^th anniversary of the Charter of Medina between the Prophet Muhammad and the people of that city, regardless of their religious identity.

Both “A Common Word between Us and You” and the “Marrakesh Declaration” are critical, new contributions by the Muslim faith community to a narrative that supports our two faith communities and others in our efforts to live together in peace and goodwill.

Baptists and religious liberty

Baptists have made their own unique contributions to the quest for common ground between our faith communities. Baptist theology elevates the status of every human being by its twin focus upon the individual and each person’s right to freedom of conscience. These emphases were drawn from both Holy Scripture and Baptist experience.

Biblical passages, such as “what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor” (Ps 8:4–5), and “In those days people will no longer say, ‘the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ Instead, everyone will die for their own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—their own teeth will be set on edge” (Jer 31:29–30), convinced Baptists that both because of the honor God has bestowed upon every human and because of their responsibility before God for their own actions, it was essential for the right of each person’s conscience to be protected. This was especially so in matters of faith.

Thomas Helwys, the leader of the small group of believers called Baptists who returned to England from the Netherlands where they had sought protection, penned the first defense of religious liberty in the English language in late 1611 and early 1612. Baptist scholar Walter Shurden, writing of Helwys, says:

Speaking to King James about Roman Catholics, Helwys said that he and others of his ilk had no thoughts of provoking evil against Catholics. Then he added one of the most oft-quoted lines from The Mystery: “For we do freely profess that our lord the king has no more power over their consciences than over ours, and that is none at all. For our lord the king is but an earthly king, and he has no authority as a king but in earthly causes. And if the king’s people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all human laws made by the king, our lord the king can require no more. For men’s religion to God is between God and themselves. The king shall not answer for it. Neither may the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure. This is made evident to our lord the king by the scriptures.” ¹¹

The right of conscience is one of the Baptist tradition’s most significant contributions to the articulation of human rights. The Baptist insistence on freedom of religion entails respect for others’ decisions about their faith. In this way, the principle of religious liberty also creates common ground for community between people of differing faiths through which they might strive together for the benefit of all. In other words, religious liberty provides common ground to seek the common good.

Using the experience of the Baptist churches of Rochester, New York, we get a glimpse of this counternarrative at work. The Rev. Alan Newton, Executive Minister for the American Baptist Churches of Rochester/Genesee, has been in the forefront of building interfaith relations in the Rochester area. Their interaction takes many forms, from youth attending a day-long conversation to the monthly meeting of the Commission on Christian and Muslim relations. Churches and mosques have formed small intimate dialogue groups. The Muslim and Christian communities hold rallies and community education programs and sponsor joint service projects. Family-to-family pairings are being organized that meet over several months to foster deep personal relationships. As a result, deep friendships are formed and stereotypes are shattered.

Rev. Newton notes that in Rochester “Christians are quick to defend the Muslim community, even protect them from the hate and absurd statements made during this election cycle … Many more churches recognize that Muslims are not to be feared. Muslim leaders know that if they need help with something … the Christian community will respond. Finally, many Christians realize that they are welcome guests at the area mosque and Muslims know they are welcome in many area churches.”

Like Baptists and Muslims in the Kansas City area who joined in dialogue following the bombing at the Boston Marathon, Christians and Muslims in Rochester have created a counternarrative, rooted in their common humanity and the twin love commands of their scriptures, to the mutual exclusion and hate that too often stain our society. Miroslav Volf in his book, Allah: A Christian Response, cautions, “If we fail to do what God requires—for Christians, if we aren’t obeying the two Great Commandments to love God and neighbor—we are neither fulfilling our most central duty before God nor fully flourishing as human beings.” ¹²