religion, or at least to exercise a certain caution in that area. This too contributes incalculably to the exodus from the churches, especially from those churches that have encouraged people to think for themselves.
In the face of this renewed questioning of religion, many who are committed to a faith tradition are prone to become defensive. Typically, their defense, when it is not just emotional, draws upon three observations: (1) While, throughout recorded history, religion may have caused occasional harm, its major contribution to human civilization has been positive. (2) Religious factions that create or foster hostility and violence are usually distortions of the faiths they imagine they are serving. (3) Very often where religion is blamed for destructive attitudes or events, the truth is that the religion is being used to bolster causes that are ideologically or politically driven. For example, few if any informed persons believed that “the troubles” in Northern Ireland were really the consequence of genuinely Catholic and Protestant agendas, even though the media invariably referred to the situation in those terms.
Such defense of religion is legitimate enough when it is sensitively stated; but it rarely gets at the heart of the problem. For the problem is not only that religion is frequently misinterpreted and misused; the problem is that there are dangerous and vulnerable spots in most if not all religious faiths, which, if they are not recognized and their practical effects closely monitored within the communities holding these faiths, are likely under certain social conditions to become vehicles for the expression of suspicion, prejudice, fear, or hatred of others. And the really subtle aspect of all this is that such dangerous and vulnerable spots in a religious system cannot be confined to those rather obvious places where religious belief treads a fine line between strong personal faith and bigotry with respect to others; rather, such flash points can and do emerge in connection with the most apparently innocent or seemingly positive affirmations of a faith tradition. It is obvious enough, for instance, that a religious community that blatantly excludes from salvation or fullness of humanity any who do not consent to its self-same dogmas is actively courting conflict with others. But it is not at all obvious that belief in a deity whose compassion abounds, or a sacred text that marvelously illumines the mind, or a moral code that affirms the unique value of each individual, or a faith community in which human mutuality and unity are fostered—it is not at all obvious that such highly affirmative and apparently humane affirmations of faith might be or become the spiritual heritage out of which a religion . . . “kills.”
Immediately within the ecumenical Christian community itself, however, we have witnessed over the past four or five decades how it happens that precisely such well-established and seemingly salutary teachings of our faith can become the occasions for tension, alienation, and the exclusion or oppression of minorities. The central figure of Christianity—the Christ—pictured by pietistic and liberal theologies of the nineteenth century in the most gentle and inclusive terms, has been perceived by significant numbers of Christians and others a century later as an excluding representation of the divine: as a white, male image of God, the Jesus of ecclesiastical doctrine and practice has conveyed to many women and non-Caucasians an extension and legitimization of patriarchy and Western domination. Moreover, his cross, the chief symbol of the faith, has been felt by significant numbers of thoughtful Christians to valorize suffering and impede the liberation of marginalized people. Again, the prominence of anthropological interest in the Bible, which heretofore was taken for granted and even lauded, began—in the face of the crisis of the biosphere and the degradation of the natural order by aggressive Western technocracy—to seem to many a highly questionable and even perilous anthropocentrism.
In short, we have been through a period of intense scrutiny of our faith, a quest for its unexamined assumptions, its implicit biases and hidden messages. Most of us over the past thirty years have learned—a little—to listen to the words of Scripture, liturgy, hymnody, theology, and preaching with the ears of others: women; racial, ethnic and sexual minorities; economically or otherwise disenfranchised people. We have not achieved all we should have in this respect, but some significant practical and attitudinal changes have been made, at least in liberal and moderate Christian circles.
But it is, one suspects, only a beginning. Not only is the habit of self-critical reflection on our beliefs and pronouncements limited to a minority of thinking Christians, albeit a significant minority, it is still very much an in-house phenomenon. I mean that those of us in the churches of Europe and its satellites who do ask how our faith and witness may be heard by others have still not encompassed in our horizon of consciousness those others who exist outside the boundaries of our more conventional, more familiar occidental sphere. To some extent, we have learned since World War II to listen to our own preaching and theology with the ears of Jews: the catastrophe of the Holocaust, together with the testimony of the Jewish community in our midst, have awakened us from our centuries-long sleep with respect to Christendom’s active and passive roles in the sufferings of its parental faith. In a less consistent manner we have begun to recognize, some of us, the role that our religion has played in the humiliation of the indigenous peoples of our continent and the planet at large. Certainly more of us today have learned to listen to Christian doctrinal and moral teachings—for instance on marriage and sexuality—with the ears of persons spontaneously inclined toward members of their own sex. In these and other ways, speaking at least for significant minorities within the remnants of classical Protestantism, I think it may be said without undue exaggeration that our awareness of those who are other has expanded significantly by comparison with the past. We are more inclusive in our thinking today—not only in terms of whom we welcome into our congregations but in terms of our basic perception of the great variety of human life: of the multitude out there who hear or overhear or partially hear or mishear what we are saying and praying and singing and writing in our churches and Christian councils, and who are affected, willy-nilly, by what we say and do, and do not say or do.
Still, I think we should have to conclude that this consciousness of others is only in its initial stages, for the multitude out there is much greater and more diverse than we have yet been able to grasp. I suppose we shall never grasp it fully, for the contemporary, wired world is indeed a multitude; its diversity is scarcely imaginable, yet in its immense variety it is no longer far away but part of our immediate environment—as any five-minute surfing of the Internet demonstrates. The mandate that is issued to Christians, in this opening up of the great world that we call globalism, means that we shall have to attempt a more informed consciousness of and compassion for the entire world than Christianity heretofore has ever had, or even felt that it ought to have. For without such consciousness we shall never be able even to formulate our witness, let alone to anticipate the effects of our witness, for good or ill, on those who hear it—all of whom, regardless of race or clime or creed are, according to our faith, beloved children of God.
In other language, ecumenical thinking in the future Christian movement will have to be almost infinitely more expansive than it has been before. The Oikoumene—the known world—for the early church meant the territories, tribes, and peoples clustered around the Mediterranean Sea. After the sixteenth-century European discoveries of new lands, even whole continents, the Oikoumene had to be enlarged, and this enlargement has continued apace throughout the centuries ever since, as knowledge of the planet and its vast spaces and myriad cultures grew. Moreover, we know that this expansion of the Oikoumene has not been an easy or automatic process, so far as the church’s intellectual and emotional appropriation of it is concerned. It is one thing to discover a new fact about the world, for example to find out about cultures heretofore unknown; it is something else to absorb such facts to the point of letting them affect our thinking—including our theologies. Such absorption requires time. Religious communities taking shape initially within well-established and relatively monocultural frameworks (such as the Roman empire or, later on, the European community of nations and their colonies, or nineteenth-century America) quite naturally reflect the mentality of their geopolitical context; and it takes a very long time for religious communities to transcend their cultural conditioning long enough to take in, mentally and spiritually, the new, enlarged world of their present. Euro-American theology and ecclesiastical policy still today has conspicuous difficulty encompassing in its purview even the reality and the meaning of theologies developed in Latin America.
