Is Religion Violent? Are Religions Violent? Gabriel Moran Before one can investigate the relation between religion and violence, it is necessary to point out an ambiguity in the meaning of “religion.” For most of its history, the word religion referred to practices (worship of god/gods). There was a right way and a wrong way to do it; religion was either true or false. In the late sixteenth century, the meaning of the term took a dramatic turn. “Religion” came to mean a plurality of institutions with names such as Judaism and Christianity. The earlier meaning did not disappear so that the two meanings often mix together which is a source of confusion. “Religion” is an instance of what Wittgenstein calls a “conceptual puzzle,”i a term that has nearly opposite meanings. Asking for a “definition” of such a term makes no sense. One has to keep asking about the time, place and context for the use of the term. It could be said paradoxically that “religions” is not the plural of “religion”; instead, it is the plural of “a religion.” Religion in its older meaning was singular; there was (true) religion as opposed to false practices. Religion in its newer meaning is plural; even when only one religion is discussed, the assumption is that it is one of many religions. Religion in its older meaning is mainly external action, the performance of a ritual by a community or a member of a community. Religion in its newer meaning is mainly an institution that houses the interiority of its individual members. The question “Is religion violent?” is related to but distinguishable from “Are religions violent?” The first question tends to fall to psychologists and researchers in human development. The second question is more the interest of historians and social scientists. When the question is asked, “Is a particular religion violent?” the answer involves social, cultural and political material in addition to “religion” in its earlier meaning. It is a widespread claim in secular writing today that religion causes violence or even that religion is the chief cause of violence in history.ii One cannot begin to respond to this claim without first sorting out the confusion in the use of “religion.” The usual assumption is that there is a trans-historical essence of religion, separable from politics, which is found everywhere and that this religion is a constant source of violence. The particular arrangement of religious institutions in modern European and North American countries tends to be imposed everywhere. Violence and Religion (Religious Practices) The original meaning of “religion” was a set of practices directed mainly though not exclusively toward God. Augustine was aware of an ambiguity in the meaning of the term religion that the Christian Church imported from the classical world: “We have no right to affirm with confidence that “religion” is confined to the worship of God, since it seems that this word has been detached from its normal meaning in which it refers to an attitude of respect in relations between a man and his neighbor.”iii

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How many people who make confident generalizations about religion are aware that in the late fourth century the “normal meaning” of religion was respect for one’s neighbor? This ambiguity did not prevent Augustine from writing a book De Vera Religione, which is not a claim that Christianity is the true religion but an affirmation that genuine worship of God has always existed. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae has only one question on “religion.” Religion is treated as part of the virtue of justice; it renders to God what is God’s due.iv The problem about making any generalization about practices called religion is where to draw a boundary for what counts as religion. If one starts from the history of the word, rather than a contemporary idea of religion, we have a better basis of identifying some practices as religion. Augustine’s note that the “normal meaning” of religion is respect for one’s neighbor does not refer to an anomaly or coincidence. Religion was respect for one’s neighbor and in a heightened way for the “creator of heaven and earth.” The two great commandments in the Bibles are first, to love God with one’s heart and soul; second, to love one’s neighbor as oneself. These two commands are not parallel; they entail each other. Love (honor, respect, praise, worship) of God is shown by love of one’s neighbor. The love of one’s neighbor has to extend to all neighbors if it is to reach God. No doubt there are people who think that they love God because they do not love anyone else. Such individuals are liable to kill people “in the name of God.” A main problem is limiting “neighbor” to people on my street or in my community and failing to discover that the stranger is my cousin. There is nothing intrinsically violent about worship, respect, devotion, praise or honor directed to God. The attempt is to make sacred all of life but religion is vulnerable to distortions because it touches the deepest roots of life. Religious practices commonly involve rituals concerning food and sex. The rituals place some restrictions on these forces of life; the restrictions are not intended to be a negation of life. Such rituals create and express a community bond; religion is not a weekly affair; it is part of the fabric of daily life. I noted in chapter four the prevalence of “sacrifice” in history, including the present when the nation-state seems to be the object of devotion. Humans throughout the centuries have had an impulse to praise, honor and thank the creator and sustainer of life. Unfortunately, the symbolizing of this acknowledgment that humans do not own the world has sometimes taken the form of destruction of life. The most gruesome misunderstanding of religion was human sacrifice, practiced for example in the Aztec empire. Bartolomé de Las Casas, “protector of the Indians,” while condemning the practice tried to understand it.v Because people take religion so seriously it can go seriously bad. If one attends to the actual use of the word religion, its most common meaning for a thousand years of church history was to describe the life of the monk. The monk was said “to enter religion” and become “a religious” who led “a religious life.” This language is confusing in the context of the modern meaning of religions, although the Roman Catholic Church still uses this language. Most Catholics do not seem to notice the peculiarity of their language in which the clergy, including bishops and pope, do not lead a religious life. The language is worth trying to understand though the Catholic Church is badly in need of a reformation of its basic categories.

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The association of “religion” with monastic communities was not an aberration. The monk or nun took “evangelical vows,” that is, promises to follow closely the teachings of Jesus in the gospels. These vows were usually called poverty, chastity and obedience. They were an attempt to express a poor, chaste, obedient attitude to God embodied in a love for one’s immediate community and a service to the world. The “religious life” was to be an intensifying of Christian life, an example to “normal” Christians of how life need not be bogged down by attachment to material possessions, sexual practice and independence of choice. Such brotherhoods and sisterhoods need not have included violence but their discipline of life could slip over into violent activities directed inwardly or outward toward others. Without someone carefully monitoring who joined the community, it could attract disturbed individuals. Monasteries easily became corrupted by an accumulation of corporate wealth, or by a failure to redirect sexual energy into healthy alternatives, or by dictatorial authority (“the voice of the prior is the voice of God”). There is still a place for religious brotherhoods and sisterhoods but only for unusually mature people who grasp the relations between love of near and far neighbors, respect for one’s own body, and worship of the divine. Modern science, especially psychology, casts doubt on many religious practices. It is not evident, however, that the modern world has found a way to discipline personal greed, sexual promiscuity and selfish individualism. Religion can be a way of putting things in perspective and resisting violence. Violence and Religions In the Latin West, the modern meaning of religion emerged with recognition of Catholic and Protestant as names of different religions. That usage in the late sixteenth century quickly faded as Catholic and Protestant became widely accepted as parts of the Christian religion. By the early seventeenth century, Judaism and Islam were seen to fit within the idea of “a religion.” What other names belong on a list of religions is debatable. It is unclear if Buddhism fits the category of “a religion.” Hinduism as a religion is even more problematic.vi Some people have proposed simply getting rid of the term religion but I doubt that is possible.vii However, the ambiguity built into the term should never be forgotten in any discussion of religion(s) and violence. This section is limited to Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions because they are the clearest examples of “a religion.” The issue of violence is particularly acute in the respective histories of these three religions. The contemporary world urgently needs an answer to the question, “Are Christianity and Islam fated to violent confrontation because their very natures dictate it?” Contemporary Jewish religion does not pose the same problem as Christianity and Islam. However, ideas from the Hebrew Bible are present in Israeli-Palestinian conflict which is geographically very limited but reverberates around the world. Furthermore, Christian and Muslim violence cannot be understood without including the accounts of violence in the sacred scripture of the Jews. A question could be raised not about limiting the discussion to three religions but whether three is too many. Can any generalizations be made about religions? Although there is no common essence called religion on which generalizations can be based, Jewish, Christian and

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Muslim histories have points of overlap and the religions are rightly called siblings. To outsiders, Jews, Christians and Muslims look very similar. “God spoke, God spoke to us, God spoke to us as his chosen few, God spoke to us his chosen few for the benefit of all creation.” To insiders there are stark differences among these religions and members of each group may resist all comparisons. While I respect the protest against reducing these religions to a common denominator, it is of some help in examining violence to notice a similar logic in these three religions. The peculiar logic of (these) religions is often lost sight of. Religious language is mostly poetry, story, and instructions for performance. In the modern world, poetry is thought to be an acquired taste, storytelling is understood as entertainment mainly for children, and instruction about behavior is considered an unwelcome intrusion in the life of the individual. The result of these contemporary attitudes toward the characteristics of religion is that religious literature and practices have difficulty getting a hearing in the market place. Universal Intent but Particular People, Places and Events A surface acquaintance with the Bibles and Qur’an suggests a claim that God delivered to his people the final and absolute truth. These truths would take precedence over anything that has happened since then. A deeper acquaintance with this literature, however, makes apparent that things are not that simple. There are regular warnings against possessive adjectives. “Our” God is actually the God of the universe who is not our or anyone’s possession. This God deals with humans in the particularities of their existence, that is, with this group of people, at this particular moment, in this particular place. Philosophers speculate in language that becomes more abstract as it becomes more comprehensive. Religions, although they intend universality, never abstract from a concrete language in which their intention is embodied. Biblical religion is a story of a people responding to a call; they are to be a model for all nations but they constantly fail in that vocation. If the Hebrew Bible is considered an epic, it is a strange kind of quest in which the starring actors never quite get what they want or, rather, what they think they want. At every stage of the story it becomes increasingly evident that the people have underestimated the dimensions of the story. The One we thought was our god, a warrior who would lead us to defeat our enemies, has his own incomprehensible ways. We trust that the God who chose us as his people will not abandon us, but at times of conflict he seems to be on the other side as well. Northrop Frye, a literary theorist, says with only a slight exaggeration that “mythically, the Exodus is the only thing that really happens in the Old Testament.”viii The term exodus has its primary meaning in the story of the Israelites escaping from Egypt. That one event is used as a lens to understand history from the beginning and history as it still happens. In the New Testament, Luke uses the term exodos to describe the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. A main Jewish objection to the New Testament is that it ends the story which should have no end. “Christ redeemed the world”; end of story. The Jew looks at the newspaper and asks: Is this a redeemed world?ix But the Christian story has its own ambiguities and a tension between

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one event and all events, one community and the community of humankind, human life and the universe. The New Testament does not say that Christ walked out of the tomb, a victorious warrior. It says that “Jesus was raised from the dead by his Father as the first fruits of the earth; the resurrection is a down payment on a future fulfillment for all.” The Muslim claim to continue the story of Torah and Gospel is a good reminder to Christians that the fullness of the Christ is still to be realized in the struggle for peace and justice.x Islam has a rich inheritance in continuing the story but it also has to be careful to keep the story open to further surprises. The one doctrine that seems to be shared by Jewish Bible, Christian Bible and Qur’an is God as creator of the universe. The Hebrew Bible in its final form places the doctrine first, but this insight arrives last, not first. Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions still do not grasp the oneness of creation and the unity of humankind. If these traditions did understand the doctrine of a creator God we would not have brother killing brother. The Bibles and the Qur’an warn that universal brotherhood (and sisterhood) does not come about by proclamation of an abstract truth. Peace can come about only by patient listening and concrete acts of kindness and healing. The inner tension of biblical tradition begins with the first two chapters of the book of Genesis. In Genesis I, the creation of a great cosmos is the main story line: light and darkness, heaven and earth, land and oceans, sun and moon, birds and fishes, plants and animals. As a final production, God says: “Let us make man in our image.” Who God was speaking to is a puzzle. One possibility is that he was addressing the other animals and asking their help in creating the human animal. The humans are given a central place though they have to be aware that they are a tiny speck in a vast universe. The second creation story starts rather than ends with the humans. That might sound more arrogant than the first story but in relation to the garden created for “Adam” (the earthling) God’s instructions are to “dress it and keep it.” That is, the man and his helpmate are managers not owners of the property. They seem to have all that they could desire but for inexplicable reasons they break the one rule in the garden and find themselves exiled from home. The shame they feel leads them to clothe themselves and to begin building a civilized world. The pain of a man’s labor in tilling the earth is matched by the woman’s labor in bringing new humans into the world. Any “dominion” (Gen I: 26) that humans may have is distorted by their fall from grace. In the garden the humans named the animals rather than killed them. In the extensive Christian commentaries on Genesis from the second to the thirteenth centuries, killing animals is a sign of sin not a celebration of human power.xi The two creation stories are strikingly different in tone because of the perspective from which each story is told. In the first telling, the perspective is a universal outlook – a god’s eye view of the universe. In the second story, the view is a particular one from the ground – a man, a woman, a tree, a serpent. The tension between the universal and the particular runs throughout Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions. When the two strands are separated, each view can lead to violence. A “universalism” loses sight of the simple joys and heartbreaking sorrows of ordinary individuals. In this view nothing should stand in the way of the great design. What may

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seem to be the only alternative, a particularism of individual details, is likely to spawn wars in defense of my house, our nation, and the sacred history of one people. In the contemporary world much of science is biased toward the first story of an unimaginably vast universe. But without the second story, human life is threatened by meaninglessness. In a universe said to be 12.9 billion years old, human life is smaller than a speck of dust. Among people who report such numbers, the assumption seems to be that if only the general population would recognize how small and insignificant humans are they would feel some humility and stop doing damage to their environment. The logic is flawed. Most people now know that the universe is very old and very big in comparison to human kind. Whether the world is a few billion or a few hundred thousand years old makes little difference in the way most people act. They need to believe that their actions are meaningful and that the human quest for justice and peace makes sense. The biblical and quaranic stories still provide a plausible plot line for billions of people, much to the chagrin of modern rationalists who offer impressively large numbers and comprehensive theories of the world’s origin. In environmental literature, the main enemy is regularly said to be “anthropocentrism.” This original sin is especially attributed to Christianity (with Judaism included in the phrase JudeoChristian). Lynn White, Jr, in a famous essay, attributed the origin of our ecological problem to Christianity, which he called “the most anthropocentric religion” that has ever existed.xii Most readers seem to take that as the ultimate condemnation of Christianity. Actually, it could be taken as high praise. Both creation stories in the Bible place the humans at the center where they belong. The trouble comes from their ec-centricity, going off center and wanting to be on top and in control of the world rather than remaining at their task of “dressing and keeping” what surrounds them. There is no “environment” without humans occupying the center. To care for the plants and other animals, the humans have to situate themselves as the responsible animals who can listen and respond to the beings in their environment. The choice is between isolated, controlling, rationalistic man who tries to get on top and a community of men, women and children who try to live with care and respect for the creatures that surround them. The three Abrahamic traditions at their best do not choose between universalism and particularism. They use a logic in which the particular and universal are always together. A particular place or time is particular insofar as it embodies the (nearly) universal; otherwise it is simply one of many parts of a larger whole. The universal, to the degree that it exists, is found embodied in particular people, events and places. Without the particular, the claim to universality fails to be more than a general and abstract pronouncement which is oppressive when it is not banal. Great works of art manifest this logic by which they touch upon a human universality in their concreteness. Of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Northrop Frye writes: “If you wish to know the history of eleventh-century Scotland, look elsewhere; if you wish to know what it means for a man to gain a kingdom and lose one’s soul, look here.”xiii The same is true for a great work of

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music, painting or sculpture. Anyone who looks deeply enough into a single work may discover truth and value that are not confined to the time and place of the work’s origin. No work of art or religion is completely and finally universal; the future is the most obvious missing element. Each religion has to be careful not to fill in the difference between the truly universal and the intended universality of a particular religion. A particular religion should not speak as if it owned all the good words. Room has to be left so that the particulars of two or more traditions can point to a universality that goes beyond each and all of them. If a religion lays claim to already being universal, violence is almost inevitable. Each of the religions has difficulty maintaining the relation between particular and universal. Dialogue with their two siblings is a big help to keeping open the gap between an intended universality and the reality of the particular time, place and people. It is a presumptuous but not an absurd claim of Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions that the history of the world is reflected in one series of events, and that the life of one people is representative of the human community. The test of the claim’s validity is whether the small community turns inward to protect what it thinks it possesses or whether its concerns are to share what has been given to it and to work at reducing violent conflicts that blind humans to their kinship. Immediately following the first creation story we have the story of the first murder. Cain killed Abel and so it goes. As Regina Schwartz notes, we do not have killing today because Cain killed his brother; rather we continue to kill for similar petty reasons of jealously, greed and hatred. xiv We also continue to mistake the insight offered by the biblical story. God asks Cain: “Where is Abel your brother”? Cain answers: “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper”?xv Instead of answering Cain’s question, God describes the consequences of the murder. It is regularly assumed that if God had answered the question, he would have said: “Of course I want you to be your brother’s keeper.” But if God had deigned to answer, his likely response would have been: “Brothers are neither for keeping nor for killing. I did not ask you to be your brother’s keeper but to be your brother’s brother.” Respecting the freedom of other people is a much greater challenge than being their keeper. With professions of good intention, the powerful of the earth have thought it their right and duty to be the keeper of the poor, the uneducated, the under classes of the world.xvi A universal brotherhood and sisterhood is not the simple task of being my brother’s and sister’s keeper but achieving a healthy tension between freedom and necessity, personal desire and community wisdom, human goods and earthly balance. The historical record shows constant failure to live up to what each religion professes, but none of the religions is fated always to repeat the same errors. After the 2001 bombings in the United States, Prime Minister Tony Blair said the attacks were “no more a reflection of true Islam than the Crusades were of true Christianity.”xvii That statement presupposes that Tony Blair (or someone) knows what true Islam is as opposed to false Islam. However, the comparison that Blair made to the Crusades is relevant. Christians now

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think that the Crusades are not true Christianity but that was not the case until fairly recently. The histories of Islam and Christianity do not neatly divide into the true and the false. The division is more between a Christian or a Muslim ideal and the real historical record. How did the ideal of Christian love issue in the real horror of the Crusades? How can a contemporary Muslim understand his religion as sanctioning suicide bombings? Members of a religion tend to view their own religion as an advocate of peace. Christians claim that they are peace loving, despite the shocking record of violence that has accompanied the church. W. Cantwell Smith made the insightful comment that in religious controversies each side argues from the ideal condition of one’s own religion and the real condition of one’s opponent.xviii Thus, when Christians say that “Christians love one another,” they speak truthfully of the Christian ideal. When Muslims say that Christianity is a source of violence they speak truthfully about much of Christian history. Those who wish to avoid condemning religions regularly say that religion can be the source of either peace or violence. While the statement is historically accurate it does not get us very far. The hard reality is that the potential for peace and the inclination toward violence are inextricably linked. The difficult task is to understand why and how the potential for violence and the potential for peace spring from the same source. (Mono) Theism as a False Hope In the seventeenth century the project to organize all knowledge according to empirical observation and mathematical reasoning included the invention of the words theism and deism. The two words were used interchangeably until well into the eighteenth century. Eventually, “deism” became the name of a rational system opposed to “traditional” religion. Theism went down a different track in allowing revelation as a supplement to rational or natural religion. Theism thus became an abstract genre under which Jewish, Christian and Muslim are specific objects.xix Opponents of Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions assumed that if you strip these religions of their distinctive doctrines and rituals, they would show the same essence. All three religions were taken to be instances of theism. It is surprising that so many Jews and Christians accepted the reductionistic deal; Muslims were more resistant. Within Western enlightenment religion (in its older meaning) was to be confined to the private life of the individual. Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions were given a private space within the state bureaucracy. The three theisms would be tamed of their violent tendencies by submitting to a system of toleration in which only the state would exercise violence. What was lost in becoming a theism was the rich texture of a tradition that has the potential for both peace and violence. What was born in the seventeenth century was a “supreme being” who either disappears after giving the world an original fillip or who controls every moment as an oppressive ruler. The religion of rationality that promised to eliminate past religious wars has never succeeded in taming the violent inclinations of human beings who are not led by reason alone.

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In the modern classification of theisms there are three columns: a-theism (0 gods), monotheism (one god) and poly-theism (two or more gods). Another possibility, pan-theism, does not usually get classified as a theism. People who want no part of theism get classified as “a-theists.” Some “atheists” show characteristics associated with being religious, for example, respect and reverence for all that exists.xx If atheism is the alternative to theism, many Jews and Christians can be called atheistsxxi. There are other people who proclaim their atheism and are obsessed with attacking theism. Mary Midgley asks: If the house is empty, why keep ringing the door bell and running away? The term monotheism approaches redundancy. In the philosophy of Western enlightenment, any reasonable theist should be able to see that there is one and only one being called god. Nietzsche may be right that the doctrine of a single deity is “the most monstrous of human errors.”xxii But Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions do not begin by arguing to a single deity who presides in heaven. Each of them begins from a transformation of ordinary experience through belief in an unnamable One who is present in all creation. “Polytheism” was created as a description and criticism of Hinduism by Westerners. There appeared to be a profusion of Indian “divinities” in contrast to the one watch maker in the sky of deism/theism. The charge of polytheism also spilled over to what seemed to be many divinities in Roman Catholicism. “Polytheism” was never a neutral category within the genre of theisms; like atheism it was a negation of “monotheism.” The hope of some modern authors that polytheism might be a way out of monotheism is illusory. The flattening out of Jewish, Christian and Muslim ways of life into belief in a single deity can be seen as an attempt to find common ground. The statement that “we are all monotheists” seems to provide a starting point for Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogue. Numerous conferences have been held under the banner of “one God, three faiths.” The apparent agreement is misleading. It would be more accurate and more productive of serious dialogue to begin with the premise of “one faith, three gods.” Each participant would then be assuming that Jews, Christians and Muslims direct their act of believing to the One beyond names but that their traditions cannot leave behind the images, language, and historical experience that are particular to the tradition. For genuine dialogue, the indispensable starting point is a trust in the “good faith” of one’s interlocutor. While it is true that faith is tied to particular beliefs which differ from one tradition to another, faith as openness and trust can be a bond of unity. Religious tolerance can be understood as accepting another person despite what they believe, or accepting another person because one appreciates what it means to believe. Understanding the beliefs of another person or tradition is difficult work, but the openness of faith can be presumed present unless there is contrary evidence. Land One of the chief tests of the particular as embodying the universal is the attitude toward land. “Our” god who speaks to us inevitably includes land as what is promised to us, a place that

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is ours. The claim is often backed by military force tied to a religious belief that God has drawn the lines. Religion cannot be separated from land; the issue is possession. Can people appreciatively dwell in a land without the mistake of thinking that they own it. Modern wars continue to be fought over border disagreements. Human communities are concerned with land because they have to live somewhere. The relation to land shows up with distinctive variations in Jewish, Christian and Muslim literature. In the Bibles and the Qur’an, God not only chooses particular people but particular places that become sacred or holy. Even when the contemporary world tries to shake off religion, the idea of sacred places continues to be strong. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, battlefields are most often the holy places. Here is where our god of battle defeated your god. War monuments can be a form of religion at its worst, celebrating conquest and destruction. Land where thousands have shed their blood does deserve to be remembered but the only war monuments that are helpful are those that memorialize the dead on both sides. The key distinction in religion’s relation to land is the difference between space and place. “Place is space which has historical meanings, where some things have happened that are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across generations….Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands have been issued.”xxiii Space is outside other space; one space borders on another space; there is only so much space in a country, a continent or the earth. Places have more possibilities although places cannot be entirely separated from space. The attempt to possess a space is to compete with others who wish to possess the same space. In contrast, loving one’s place does not have to be a threat to others; in fact, loving one’s place helps people to understand why other people love their place. The Abrahamic religions are about being uprooted from the place one knows and becoming a pilgrim or sojourner in search of a place that is true home. The journey is both symbolic and physical; home is where the community now dwells, an embodying of the “heavenly Jerusalem.” The biblical story begins with Adam who is formed from the earth and always tied to the earth. Adam and Eve dwell in a garden but quickly find themselves in exile from their first home. The rest of the Hebrew Bible is about the quest for land, of people leaving home and journeying toward a promised land. The journey is never completed. For centuries, the Jews were scattered across the world. After the cataclysm of World War II a homeland was established in the land of ancient Israel. The home is actual for some Jews, symbolically important for all Jews. The relation between the ancient holy land and modern Israel remains problematic. Some Jewish settlers believe that the land they call greater Israel is theirs by divine promise. The Christian movement announced itself as a universal religion destined to spread across the world. The promise attributed to Jesus that all nations would be converted in his name has not been fulfilled. With a parochial view of the world, the medieval church may have thought that the goal of converting everyone was still within its reach. Despite a continuing spread of the Christian message today, the Christian church is a minority in the world and constantly

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becoming a smaller percentage of the world’s population. Christian theologians now generally see the church’s mission as a light to the nations, a model city, a demonstration of love of neighbor. The potential to be a mediator of peace increases as the church comes to see itself as a sign of salvation instead of a conqueror for Christ. Even as it tried to spread across the world to become catholic or universal, the church did not lose its necessary roots in particular places. “The Christian tradition has been very clear in locating the story in Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem and Galilee.”xxiv As the Christian movement spread out from the “holy land,” other places took on a holy character. The places that Paul visited – Ephesus, Thessalonica, Philippi – are retained in Christian memory as places to be venerated. In time, Rome and Constantinople rose above the rest of the places of importance. Later, shrines of devotion appeared in Santiago, Spain, Guadalupe, Mexico, Lourdes, France, and numerous other places. The idea of pilgrimage was central to Christian and Muslim thinking from their respective beginnings. The New Testament portrays Jesus as living in the desert for forty days, symbolizing the chosen people’s forty-year pilgrimage to the holy land. A pilgrim is not a wanderer but someone who has a definite place to be reached, whether or not the journey is completed. Every Muslim recapitulates the journey of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. A pilgrimage to the holy sites is one of the five pillars of Islam. Everyone who is able must go to the central place from which all places of worship radiate. A church or a mosque can be any place on earth because every place is holy. Christians and Muslims have built magnificent churches and mosques, impressive architecture which is taken to be a way of worship. Periodically, reformers have had to insist that the more important thing is the people in their place; the building can be an expensive distraction. From its founding in the seventh century C.E., Islam represented a threat to the Christian vision of itself as the worldwide religion. Islam spread with astounding speed across most of the world. Many of the places that Christianity thought of as holy places fell to the new religion. In the eleventh century, after the final split between western and eastern churches, Christianity found itself on the defensive. Several popes at the end of that century decided to rouse the Christians of the West to a counter-offensive. Thus began one of the most disgraceful projects of Christian history known as the Crusades.xxv The “way of the cross” was scandalously applied to a series of wars that were ostensibly to liberate the holy land and holy places. Nineteenth-century Christians romanticized the crusades, obscuring the historical facts. Secular historians of the twentieth century tended to dismiss the religious character of the wars, seeing them mainly in economic terms. What can get lost in trying to understand the crusades was that popes and other prominent leaders drew upon the population’s belief in the value of pilgrimage. “Pope Urban II associated military campaign with the most charismatic of all traditional penances, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.”xxvi It is easy to be cynical about a badly organized army that set out to liberate people and land; nevertheless, many people thought they were fighting a holy war. Before scoffing at the idea that anyone could believe in a holy war we have to recognize how recent

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wars continue to be presented as ordained by God and requiring the “sacrifice” of a nation’s youth. Far from disappearing from memory the crusades or at least the language of crusade took on new and ominous meaning in recent history. There was no Arabic word for “the war of the cross” until the nineteenth century but it became a rallying cry for an Arab nationalist movement and a pan-Islamic movement. Sayyid Qutb, the influential Egyptian thinker behind much of Islamic political activity, said “western blood carries the spirit of the crusades within itself. It fills the subconscious of the West.”xxvii The United States, with its peculiar mix of Christianity in its politics, has been especially inclined to describe its wars as crusades. At least since Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of an idealistic war that would make the world safe for democracy, leaders have used the word crusade seemingly innocent of its connotations for Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians. Dwight Eisenhower called his history of World War II “the Crusade in Europe.” He explained his choice of title by saying “the forces that stood for human good and men’s rights were this time confronted by a completely evil conspiracy with which no compromise could be tolerated. Because only by the utter destruction of the Axis was a decent world possible, the war became for me a crusade in the traditional sense of that often misused word.”xxviii Eisenhower was confident that he was using “crusade” properly but he was using a word for medieval religious wars against Islam to describe the war against Germany. One could almost sympathize with George W. Bush for the uproar he created by his use of “crusade” a few days after Sept. 11, 2001. Someone should have warned him against saying “this crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.”xxix He was stunned by the intense reaction to such a commonly used term; he wisely avoided the word in his address to Congress a few days later. Bush’s use of “crusade” played right into the role that Osama bin Laden had prepared. Concerning the invasion of Afghanistan, Bin Laden said “the battle is between Muslims – the people of Islam – and the global Crusaders.”xxx On the Muslim side of the conflict, the term jihad, which is used thirty-five times in the Qur’an, has become well known.xxxi The most militaristic wing of “radical Islam” is called jihadists. For some people, jihad signals that Islam is a violent religion intent on military conquest. In reaction, defenders of Islam sometimes claim that the meaning of jihad is spiritual and inner. If one takes seriously the Muslim relation to place, the “struggle” of jihad cannot be completely spiritualized. The “greater jihad” refers to personal transformation but the “lesser jihad” as external expression has often involved armed struggle. The Qur’an introduced an ethical concern into war, though the fact of war was assumed. Similar to Christian attempts to put limits on war, Muslim law distinguished between combatant and non-combatant. Muslims were supposed to fight only against oppressors and “if the enemy desists, they must also cease hostilities.”xxxii An often quoted line from the Qur’an is “there can be no compulsion in religion.”xxxiii If that command were always observed, it would dramatically decrease the potential for violence in a missionary religion. Critics are quick to point out that compulsion can take many hidden and indirect forms. Not just toleration of others but mutual respect is needed for lasting peace.

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Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in relative peace under Muslim rule in medieval Spain. Sidney Griffith warns that this convivencia has been somewhat romanticized.xxxiv Jews and Christians were “protected peoples”; their rights were limited but they were not persecuted. Griffith refers to the remarkable fact that from the mid-seventh to the end of the eleventh centuries fifty percent of the world’s confessing Christians lived under Muslim rule.xxxv Most Christians are perhaps unaware of how dependent on Islam medieval Christianity was for its science, mathematics and philosophy. The tragic centuries-long conflict leading up to Bush versus Bin Laden was not the past’s only possibility and not the fate of the future. Christians and Muslims need bilateral understanding which is unlikely without much more work at internal reform and reinterpretation of doctrines based on a solid knowledge of tradition. Revelation: Bad Choice? Just before the advent of the Christian movement biblical thought was mixed with Hellenistic and Eastern philosophies. It was a time of apocalyptic movements. A secret knowledge of how the world ends was central to these groups. Apocalypse meant a revelation of the final truth. Not by accident the word apocalyptic became associated with violence. Those who have a picture of how the world ends are not inclined to be patient about obstacles to realization of the final truth. Any attempt to live by revelation (apocalyptically) almost inevitably leads to violent conflict with the give and take of ordinary experience. The term apocalypse (revelation) was used in a few places in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible but without a special meaning or prominent place. There is no reference to God revealing himself. In trying to control outbreaks of the spirit, church officials domesticated the idea of revelation. The main body of Christendom made revelation a process that had come to an end in the past. Once the words were on paper the revelation was thought to be complete and to be safely in the hands of official interpreters. This movement to control the idea of a divine revelation has never been entirely successful. If God has made clear the final truth, no authority can supersede God’s authority. Neither the New Testament nor the Qur’an is a book of divinely revealed truths. Each is an embodying of divine speaking that invites a human response. In Christianity, Jesus as the Christ is the “word of God”; the scriptures witness to that word. In Islam, the word of God is a heavenly Qur’an which cannot fall into human hands. Despite claims by some Christians and Muslims to possess God’s revelation, God remains hidden and has his own ways. Although the New Testament and the Qur’an indicate a finality in what God says, each of them points beyond itself to divine ways outside human comprehension and control. The Qur’an affirms that every community has its own messenger; each people has its own “law and path and way of life.”xxxvi In Christian history, Christ is the end, but Christ has not ended. In Christian language, Christ is savior of all; God has other ways than membership in the existing church of believers. These doctrines of Christianity and Islam may seem of interest only to Christians or Muslims. But world peace has a stake in how Christians and Muslims appropriate their own religions. The term revelation was probably not the best vehicle of understanding but the idea

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cannot simply be excised. If the term revelation is to be used by each of the three religions it should be restricted to a divine activity. The human response is the act of trusting or believing which issues in (Christian, Muslim, or other) beliefs. Nothing that is in human words is divine revelation. The Bible has survived all forms of modern criticism; it continues to be witness to a heavenly word of God. The Qur’an has not been subject to similar instruments of criticism but there is no reason that modern scholarship cannot support the earthly text as recitation of the heavenly book. The mystics of all three religions have lived by the principle that “No understanding of the Holy Book is possible until it is actually revealed to the believer just as it was revealed to the prophet.”xxxvii This mystical stance is a threat to a clerical class and to authoritarian rule. Christian and Muslim religions have a potential for democratic structures which have never been realized. Reformations starting from the fourteenth century were the backdrop for modern secular democracies but the churches still trail behind in developing their own democratic structures.xxxviii Religions do require their own form of authority and distinctive practices that join past, present and future. A more limited and precise use of the term revelation would remove a large obstacle to thinking about reform. Tradition Reform of institutional structure and a better use of the term revelation are tied to the idea of tradition. Tradition is a helpful word in drawing any comparisons among Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions. One might paradoxically say that tradition is more compatible with religions than the word religion itself. The word and the idea tradition seem to have originated from a reform in Jewish history. The Pharisees, who were the reformers, wisely chose to avoid directly taking on priestly authority. The priestly class, having control of the texts, were the only ones who could say what God wanted. The Pharisees, instead of engaging in ineffective rebellion, professed equal devotion to the written word but laid claim to a second source: what was not written. To call this second source “oral tradition” would be redundant. Tradition was the name for what was passed on orally.xxxix This brilliant stroke liberalized the community but it had its own dangers. Officials who wield authoritative texts can be narrow-minded, but at least they are constrained by what is written. Tradition, as a separate source, secrets whispered in the ear, so to speak, has few restraints. What saves tradition is that it eventually produces its own written record before again breaking out orally. Tradition becomes not an entirely separate stream but the context for interpreting the text. Commentary is followed by commentary on the commentary, and tradition becomes a layering of interpretation and inevitable debate. “Tradition” begins as a verb, the act of handing on. It can include writing but connotes in addition the oral, aural and tactile. There is a tendency in human life, exacerbated in the English language, for verbs to become nouns. This tendency has especially affected “tradition” which

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becomes equated with things left by tradition rather than the continuing process of handing on. Martin Luther was careful to distinguish between misguided accretions in Christian history that were called traditions and the living process of tradition. As the Lutheran historian Jaroslav Pelikan phrases it, “tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”xl Or as H.G. Gadamer paradoxically states, “tradition exists only in constantly becoming other than it is.”xli When the boundaries for any particular tradition are too vague, the term loses its usefulness. Abstracting from differences creates a single tradition in name only. The existence of intense differences within a group of people does not mean that the tradition does not exist. Spirited debate among Jews does not mean that there is no Jewish tradition. Is there a Christian tradition? Perhaps there is, although it is more often necessary to refer to a Lutheran, Calvinist or Roman Catholic tradition. Is there an Abrahamic tradition? The differences are too great for all three religions to be a tradition, though of course the interrelations of Jewish, Christian and Muslim histories are important. Reform of traditions is carried out mainly by the insider who knows not only what to reform but how to do it. “The great advantage of tradition which is as long as that of any of the historic religions is that it gives the chance to appeal to more than one strand in it; it may at times be the reformer’s strongest ally.”xlii Every religious tradition has such disparate strands; the richer the tradition, the closer these strands come to contradicting one another. The citing of a few sentences out of context can be misleading about any tradition. Liberalizing reform has to come from reformers who are deeply not superficially conservative. Who speaks for a religious tradition? Most well-formed traditions have officials who are appointed, ordained, or chosen to re-present the tradition. But unless one believes that such officials have a direct line to the deity, they are dependent on the most thoughtful and wellinformed advisors within the tradition. The main job of the official may be to assure that a wide range of views can be heard and that debates are not ended prematurely. Dialogue between traditions presupposes serious dialogue within a tradition. Throughout the centuries Jews have been better at agreeing to disagree than have Christians. The minority in the Jewish community could later become a majority; there were no declarations of heresy. Responsible spokespersons in every part of the Christian tradition have to search for consensus about limits. There will continue to be disagreements about the exact place where the intolerable begins. But a group narrowly based on an ideology of hatred and violence (for example, the white Aryan nation) ought not to be given the respect that is due to a group that draws on rich and diverse streams of Christian tradition. Most educated people recognize that not everything in their tradition is true, good and final. They are aware that there have to be continuing efforts to improve what the past has given us to work with. Every religious reform is in the direction of the one true religion but to claim that my tradition has arrived there is not a credible position. A serious dialogue between religions does not begin with skepticism about other people’s beliefs and a supposed bracketing of one’s own beliefs. Instead of methodical doubt, dialogue

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begins, in Peter Elbow’s phrase, with methodical belief.xliii Methodical doubt settles comfortably into one view; methodical belief forces us into unfamiliar and threatening ideas. The student of religions has to sleep around with a multiplicity of beliefs while not renouncing his or her own beliefs. The first aim of religious dialogue is to find places within each tradition where people can meet one another in mutual respect. This step requires detailed knowledge of the language within the tradition that can be an obstacle to dialogue. An intermediate aim, therefore, is “to transform contradictory statements into different but not contradictory ones.”xliv For example, if Christians say Jesus is the messiah and Jews say Jesus is not the messiah, one statement is true, and one is false. Bur if Christians say Jesus is the Christ and Jews say Jesus is not the messiah, both statements could be true. That step would lead to helpful inquiry into the ways that Jesus did and did not fulfill the messianic expectations of his time, how the term Christ, originally a translation of “messiah,” acquired other meaning in history, and how Christians can look forward with Jews to the coming of a messianic era while believing in Christ. Both religious traditions can be helped by that conversation. The ultimate aim of religious dialogue is mutual transformation. The Jew becomes more Jewish, the Christian more Christian. Instead of deadly conflict, the Jew and the Christian become partners in opposing the injustices that conflict with the better world that Jews and Christians articulate in different but related ways. John Cobb has written that “true openness to other traditions will require that we make their history our own.”xlv I would add that this appropriating of history must be done very carefully with recognition that it might be misunderstood. Haven’t Christians always practiced this openness with what the Jews call the Bible and Christians call the Old Testament? Cobb uses as an example that “we Christians will view Muhammad as our prophet as well.” That possibility could be an interesting topic of conversation between Muslims and Christians but probably not something that the Christian Church should immediately assert. I see no problem in an individual Christian affirming Muhammad as a prophet. For the Christian tradition to say he is “our prophet as well” could be a presumptuous appropriation. i

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 18. For refutation of this belief, William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) does a thorough job. iii Augustine, City of God (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). XI.1. iv Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), II-II. 80.1 v Bartolomé de Las Casas, “In Defense of Human Sacrifice,” in Witness: Writings of Bartolome de Las Casas (New York: Orbis Books, 1992), 162-67. vi Peter Harrison, “’Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). vii W. Cantwell Smith in his important book The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: New American Library, 1964) suggested that the terms faith and tradition could replace religion viii Quoted in Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 168. ix Lionel Blue, To Heaven with Scribes and Pharisees (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 98. x Reza Aslan, No God but God (New York: Random House, 2005). ii

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George Ovitt, The Restoration of Perfection (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986). Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” Science, March 10, 1967, 1203-07. xiii Northrop Frye, Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 64. xiv Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2. xv Gen 4:9. xvi William McKinley, referring to the Philippines xvii New York Times, Oct. 9, 2001. xviii W. Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: New American Library, 1964), xix Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and End of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 14. xx Some of the writers on the “new atheism” recognize that their views could be called religious. Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); see Andre Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (New York: Viking Press, 2007). xxi Many Jews and Christians could agree with Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 62: “It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in vigorous growth – but that it rejects the theistic answer with profound mistrust.” xxii Quoted in George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 38. xxiii Walter Brueggemann, The Land (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 5. xxiv Brueggemann, The Land, 185. xxv Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). xii

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Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 31. Sylvia Haim cited in Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam, 74. xxviii Quoted in J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 147. xxix Reza Aslan, Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the End of the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2009), 59. xxx Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam, 75. xxxi Mark Kurlansky, Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 36. xxxii Qur’an 2:193. xxxiii Qur’an 2:256. xxxiv Sidney Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 154-55. xxxv Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, 11. xxxvi Qur’an 10:47; 5: 42-48. xxxvii Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Lahore: Institute of Islamic Culture, 1986), 181. xxxviii Brian Tierney, Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). xxxix Ellis Rivkin, Hidden Revolution: The Pharisees’ Search for the Kingdom Within (Nashville: Abington, 1978). xl Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 64. xli Catherine Zuckert, Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 101. xlii Kathleen Bliss, Future of Religions (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 43. xliii Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 63. xliv Cobb, Transforming Christianity and the World. xlv Cobb, Transforming Christianity and the World, 60 xxvii

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