Dialogue in Industrial Britain
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DIALOGUE
John Stott
My argument so far has been that mission denotes the self-giving service that God sends his people into the world to render, and includes both evangelism and sociopolitical action; that within this broadly conceived mission a certain urgency attaches to evangelism, and priority must be given to it; and that evangelism means announcing or proclaiming the good news of Jesus. This brings us to the third word, dialogue, and to the question: Is there any room for dialogue in the proclamation of the good news? It is well known that during the past decade or two the concept of “dialogue with people of other faiths” has become the ecumenical fashion, and that evangelicals have tended to react rather sharply against it. Is our negative reaction justified? And what are the issues anyway?
Extreme Views
Extreme positions have been taken on both sides of this debate. Evangelical Christians have always—and in my judgment rightly—emphasized the indispensable necessity of preaching the gospel, for God has appointed his church to be the herald of the good news. An eloquent summons to proclamation was issued by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his book Preaching and Preachers. His first chapter is titled “The Primacy of Preaching,” and on its first page he writes,
To me the work of preaching is the highest and the greatest and the most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called. If you want something in addition to that I would say without any hesitation that the most urgent need in the Christian Church today is true preaching, and as it is the greatest and most urgent need in the Church, it is obviously the greatest need for the world also.
Indeed, because the essential problem of the human race is our rebellion against God and our need of salvation, therefore “preaching is the primary task of the Church.”
To his passionate advocacy of preaching Dr. Lloyd-Jones sometimes added his distaste for the concept of dialogue: “God is not to be discussed or debated. . . . Believing what we do about God, we cannot in any circumstances allow Him to become a subject for discussion or debate or investigation . . . as if He were but a philosophical proposition.” And the same goes for the gospel: the gospel is suitable for proclamation, not for amiable discussion.
Now if by “discussion” we have in mind the work of clever diplomats at the conference table, whose objective is to satisfy (even appease) everybody, and whose method is to reach consensus by compromise, I find myself in wholehearted agreement with Dr. Lloyd-Jones. The gospel is a nonnegotiable revelation from God. We may certainly discuss its meaning and its interpretation, so long as our purpose is to grasp it more firmly ourselves and commend it more acceptably to others. But we have no liberty to sit in judgment on it, or to tamper with its substance. For it is God’s gospel not ours, and its truth is to be received not criticized, declared not discussed. Having said this, however, it is necessary to add that, properly understood, “dialogue” and “discussion” are two different things. Dr. Lloyd-Jones’s rejection of both may be seen as somewhat extreme.
At the other extreme there is a growing dislike for preaching, or at least for preaching of an authoritative or dogmatic kind. Proclamation is said to be arrogant; the humble way of communication is the way of dialogue. It would be difficult to find a more articulate exponent of this view than Professor J. G. Davies. In his opinion, “Monologue is entirely lacking in humility: it assumes that we know all and that we merely have to declare it, to pass it on to the ignorant, whereas we need to seek truth together, that our truth may be corrected and deepened as it encounters the truths of those with whom we are in dialogue.” Further, “monologue . . . is deficient in openness,” whereas “dialogue involves complete openness.” Professor Davies goes on:
To enter into dialogue in this way is not only difficult, it is dangerous. Complete openness means that every time we enter into dialogue our faith is at stake. If I engage in dialogue with a Buddhist and do so with openness I must recognize that the outcome cannot be predetermined either for him or for me. The Buddhist may come to accept Jesus as Lord, but I may come to accept the authority of the Buddha, or even both of us may end up as agnostics. Unless these are real possibilities, neither of us is being fully open to the other. . . . To live dialogically is to live dangerously.
For myself I regard this as an intemperate overstatement. It is true that good Christian preaching is always dialogical, in the sense that it engages the minds of the listeners and speaks to them with relevance. But it is not true to say that all monologue is proud. The evangelist who proclaims the gospel is not claiming to “know it all,” but only to have been put in trust with the gospel. We should also, as I believe and shall soon argue, be willing to enter into dialogue. In doing so we shall learn from the other party both about their beliefs and also (by listening to their critical reaction to Christianity) about certain aspects of our own. But we should not cultivate a total “openness” in which we suspend even our convictions concerning the truth of the gospel and our personal commitment to Jesus Christ. To attempt to do this would be to destroy our own integrity as Christians.
Dialogue in the Bible
In this dialogue about dialogue, perhaps the place to begin is with definition. A more simple and straightforward definition I have not found than that framed at the National Evangelical Anglican Congress held at Keele in 1967: “Dialogue is a conversation in which each party is serious in his approach both to the subject and to the other person, and desires to listen and learn as well as to speak and instruct.”
After this definition it is important to note that the living God of the biblical revelation himself enters into a dialogue with human beings. He not only speaks but listens. He asks questions and waits for the answers. Ever since his question went echoing among the trees of the Garden of Eden (“where are you?”), God has been seeking his fallen creature, and addressing questions to them. Of course the approach of the Infinite to the finite, of the Creator to the creature, of the Holy to the sinful has always been one of gracious self-disclosure. Nevertheless, the form his revelation has taken has often been dialogical. “Gird up your loins like a man,” he said to Job. “I will question you, and you shall declare to me” (Job 38:3; 40:7). And his address to Israel through the prophets was full of questions.
“Come now, let us reason together,”
says the LORD. (Isaiah 1:18)
“What wrong did your fathers find in me
that they went far from me?” (Jeremiah 2:5)
“Why do you complain against me?” (Jeremiah 2:29)
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? (Isaiah 40:21)
How can I give you up, O E’phraim!
How can I hand you over, O Israel! (Hosea 11:8)
Jesus too, who himself as a boy was found in the temple “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions” (Luke 2:46), during his public ministry entered into serious conversations with individuals like Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman and the crowds. He seldom if ever spoke in a declamatory, take-it-or-leave-it style. Instead, whether explicitly or implicitly, he was constantly addressing questions to his hearers’ minds and consciences. For example, “When . . . the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” (Matthew 21:40). Again, “which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (Luke 10:36). Even after the ascension, when he revealed himself to Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road, and the prostrate and blinded Pharisee appeared at first to have been crushed by the vision, Jesus addressed him a rational question: “Why do you persecute me?” and provoked the counterquestions “Who are you, Lord?” and “What shall I do, Lord?” (Acts 9:4-5; 22:10).
When later Saul began his great missionary journeys as Paul the apostle, it is instructive to notice that some form of dialogue was an integral part of his method. Luke not infrequently uses the verb dialegomai to describe an aspect of his evangelism, especially during the second and third expeditions. True, there is some uncertainty about the precise meaning of the verb. In classical Greek it meant to “converse” or “discuss” and was particularly associated with the so-called dialectic as a means of instruction and persuasion developed in different ways by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. In the Gospels it is once used of the apostles’ argumentative discussion with each other over who was the greatest (Mark 9:34). In reference to Paul’s ministry, Gottlob Schrenk, in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, says that it refers to the “delivering of religious lectures or sermons” but has no reference to “disputation.” The Arndt-Gingrich lexicon, on the other hand, though conceding that it sometimes means “simply to speak or preach” (for example, Hebrews 12:5), maintains that it is used “of lectures which were likely to end in disputations.” The context certainly suggests this too.
Thus in the synagogue at Thessalonica for three weeks “Paul . . . argued with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.’” Luke then adds: “some of them were persuaded” (Acts 17:1-4). Here five words are brought together—arguing, explaining, proving, proclaiming and persuading—which suggest that Paul was actually debating with the Jews, hearing and answering their objections to his message. In Athens we are told that he “argued” both “in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the market place every day with those who chanced to be there” (Acts 17:17). That last clause is an important addition because it shows that Paul’s reasoning approach was with casual Gentile passersby as well as with Jews in the synagogue. In Corinth he “argued in the synagogue every sabbath, and persuaded Jews and Greeks” (Acts 18:4), while at Ephesus he first “entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, arguing and pleading about the kingdom of God” and then for two years “argued daily in the hall of Tyran’nus” possibly for as long as five hours a day (Acts 19:8-10; compare Acts 18:19).
Paul also used the same method in Christian preaching, for during the famous “breaking of bread” at Troas, during which the young man Eutychus fell asleep with nearly disastrous consequences, dialegomai is again used to describe Paul’s address (Acts 20:7, 9). The last example is also interesting, because we find Paul having a dialogue with the procurator Felix, arguing with him in private about “justice and self-control and future judgment” until Felix grew alarmed and terminated the conversation (Acts 24:25). In summary, then, we may say that Paul included some degree of dialogue in most if not all his preaching, to Christians and non-Christians, to Jews and Gentiles, to crowds and individuals, on formal and informal occasions. Indeed, to add a final text, Paul seems to have expected all the disciples of Jesus to be involved in continuous dialogue with the world, for he urged the Colossians, “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer every one” (Colossians 4:6). Here are Christians in such close contact with “outsiders” (Colossians 4:5) that they are able both to speak to them (with gracious and salty speech) and to answer their questions.
The kind of “dialogue” that was included in Paul’s ministry was, however, very different from what is often meant by the word today. For Paul’s dialogue was clearly a part of his proclamation and subordinate to his proclamation. Moreover, the subject of his dialogue with the world was one that he always chose himself, namely, Jesus Christ, and its object was always conversion to Jesus Christ. If this was still the position, few who hesitate about dialogue would disagree with it. But often the modern dialogue of Christians with non-Christians seems to savor rather of unbelief, than of faith, of compromise than of proclamation. It is time now to investigate this argument against dialogue. Afterward I will seek to marshal some arguments in favor of true dialogue. Then I shall conclude with some contemporary examples.
The Argument Against Dialogue
The conservative Christian’s argument against dialogue as bordering on treason against Jesus Christ can best be understood historically. The World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 took place in an atmosphere of great confidence. I do not call it “self-confidence,” because certainly their confidence was in God. Nevertheless, they confidently predicted the imminent collapse of the non-Christian religions. W. H. Temple Gairdner in his official account of the conference could write, “The spectacle of the advance of the Christian Church along many lines of action to the conquest of the five great religions of the modern world is one of singular interest and grandeur.” This mood was rudely shaken by the outbreak of the First World War four years later. And at the second missionary conference at Jerusalem in 1928 the atmosphere was already different. Delegates were aware of the growth of secularism, and even suggested that against this universal enemy a common religious front was necessary.
Ten years later, in 1938, the third ecumenical missionary conference was held at Tambaram near Madras. Its key figure was the Dutchman Hendrik Kraemer, whose book The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World had been written and published shortly before the conference assembled. Partly under the influence of Karl Barth’s dialectic, in which he opposed religion to revelation as human religiosity over against God’s Word, Kraemer stressed that there was a fundamental “discontinuity” between the religions of humanity and the revelation of God. He rejected both aggressive Christian missions on the one hand and on the other the notion that Christ was the fulfillment of non-Christian religions, and in their place he urged the uncompromising announcement of the gospel, although “in a persuasive and winning manner.” He called the church to repossess its faith “in all its uniqueness and adequacy and power,” and added: “We are bold enough to call men out from these (sc. other religions) to the feet of Christ. We do so because we believe that in him alone is the full salvation which man needs.”
As the Tambaram conference closed, the black storm clouds of the Second World War, and of the new paganism it threatened to unleash, were already darkening the horizon, and when the war ended and ecumenical activity began again, “the coming dialogue between east and west” that Kraemer had foretold was already being canvassed by other voices. Both Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians began to formulate very differently from Kraemer the relation between Christianity and other religions. In 1963 H. R. Schlette could write that “anyone who determines his ethical and actual individual way of life on the basis of an authentic desire to live a human life according to an order founded on truth, attains salvation.” Similarly, Karl Rahner began to popularize the idea that sincere non-Christians should rather be thought of as “anonymous Christians”: “Christianity does not simply confront the member of an extra-Christian religion as a mere non-Christian but as someone who can and must already be regarded in this or that respect as an anonymous Christian.” In consequence, “the proclamation of the gospel does not simply turn someone absolutely abandoned by God and Christ into a Christian, but turns an anonymous Christian into someone who also knows about his Christian belief in the depths of his grace-endowed being by objective reflection and by the profession of faith.” Similar thinking is expressed by Raimundo Pannikar in The Unknown Christ of Hinduism.
One of the fundamental beliefs of scholars who think and write like this today is that Christ is already present everywhere, including other religions. This being so, it is in their view presumptuous of the Christian missionary to talk of “bringing” Christ with them into a situation; what they do is first to “find” Christ already there and then maybe to “unveil” him. Some go further still. They not only deny that missionaries take Christ with them, or can be the media of Christ’s self-revelation to the non-Christian; they even suggest that it is the non-Christian who is the bearer of Christ’s message to the Christian.
But is Christ present in the non-Christian world? In our increasingly pluralistic society and syncretistic age this is the basic theological question that we cannot dodge. It would be facile to reply with a bare “yes” or “no.” We need rather to ask ourselves what Christ’s apostles taught on this crucial issue. We will look in turn at statements of Peter, Paul and John.
Peter began his sermon to Cornelius: “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34-35). Some have argued from this assertion that sincere religious and righteous people are saved, especially because the story begins with an angel’s statement to Cornelius that “your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God” (Acts 10:4). But such a deduction is inadmissible. To declare that a man who fears God and practices righteousness is “acceptable” to him cannot mean that he is “accepted” in the sense of being “justified.” The rest of the story makes this plain. This sincere, God-fearing and righteous man still needed to hear the gospel. Indeed, when Peter later recounted to the Jerusalem church what had happened, he specifically recorded the divine promise to Cornelius about Peter, namely, that “he will declare to you a message by which you will be saved” (Acts 11:14). And the Jerusalem church reacted to Peter’s account by saying, “then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance unto life” (Acts 11:18). It is clear then that, although in some sense “acceptable” to God, Cornelius before his conversion had neither “salvation” nor “life.”
In his two sermons to heathen audiences, in Lystra and in Athens, the apostle Paul spoke of God’s providential activity in the pagan world. Although in the past God had allowed all the nations “to walk in their own ways,” he said, yet even then “he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good” to all people, especially by giving them rain, fruitful seasons, food and happiness (Acts 14:16-17).
To the Athenian philosophers Paul added that God the Creator was the sustainer of our life (“since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything”) and the Lord of history (“having determined allotted periods and the boundaries” of all human “habitation”) intending that people “should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him.” For “he is not far from each one of us” since, as heathen poets had said, “in him we live and move and have our being” and “we are indeed his offspring.” What these truths and the Athenians’ knowledge of them did, however, was not to enable them to find God but rather to make their idolatry inexcusable. For, having overlooked it in the past, God “now . . . commands all men everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:22-31).
This sketch Paul filled out in the early chapters of Romans. He affirms there very clearly the universal knowledge of God and of goodness in the heathen world. On the one hand God’s “invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity” are “clearly perceived in the things that have been made,” God having “shown it to them” (Romans 1:19-20). On the other hand, people know something of God’s moral law, for he had not only written it on stone tablets at Sinai; he had written it also on human hearts, in the moral nature they have by creation (Romans 2:14-15). So to some degree, Paul says, all human beings know God (Romans 1:21), know God’s law and “know God’s decree” that lawbreakers “deserve to die” (Romans 1:32). This revelation of God to all people, sometimes called “general revelation” (because made to all people), or “natural revelation” (because given in nature and in human nature), is not, however, enough to save them. It is enough only to condemn them as being “without excuse” (Romans 1:20; compare Romans 2:1; 3:19). For the whole thrust of the early chapters of Romans is that, although people know God, they do not honor him as God but by their wickedness suppress the truth they know (Romans 1:18, 21, 25, 28).
We turn now to John, and especially the prologue to the Fourth Gospel. Here he describes Jesus as “the Logos of God,” and “the light of men” (John 1:1-4). He also affirms that the light is continually shining in the darkness and that the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5). Next he applies these great axioms to the historical process of revelation. He says of the Logos, whom he later identifies as Jesus Christ, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” Indeed, “he was in the world” all the time (John 1:9, 10 NRSV). Long before he actually “came” into the world (John 1:11) he “was” already in it and was continuously “coming” into it. Moreover, his presence in the world was (and still is) an enlightening presence. He is the real light, of which all other lights are but types and shadows, and as the light he “enlightens everyone.” Thus “every human person,” Scripture gives us warrant to affirm, possesses some degree of light by his reason and conscience. And we should not hesitate to claim that everything good, beautiful and true, in all history and in all the earth, has come from Jesus Christ, even though people are ignorant of its origin. At the same time we must add that this universal light is not saving light. For one thing it is but a twilight in comparison with the fullness of light granted to those who follow Jesus as “the light of the world” and to whom is given “the light of life” (John 8:12). For another thing, people have always “loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” Because of our willful rejection of the light we are under condemnation (John 3:18-21).
The witness then of Peter, Paul and John is uniform. All three declare the constant activity of God in the non-Christian world. God has not left himself without witness. God reveals himself in nature. God is not far from any person. God gives light to every human being. But as a whole human race we reject the knowledge we have, prefer darkness to light and do not acknowledge the God we know. That knowledge by itself does not save us; it condemns us for our disobedience. Even our religiosity is a subtle escape from the God we are afraid and ashamed to meet.
We do not therefore deny that there are elements of truth in non-Christian systems, vestiges of the general revelation of God in nature. What we do vehemently deny is that these are sufficient for salvation and (more vehemently still) that Christian faith and non-Christian faiths are alternative and equally valid roads to God. Although there is an important place for “dialogue” with people of other faiths (as I shall shortly argue), there is also a need for “encounter” with them, and sometimes even for “confrontation,” in which we seek both to disclose the inadequacies and falsities of non-Christian religion and to demonstrate the adequacy and truth, absoluteness and finality of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Such encounter with people of other faiths, however, should not be abrasive or hostile. Even if we need to expose the falsehood of other religions when compared to the biblical revelation, we do not do so in order to ridicule them or their adherents. Ridicule and mockery can never be consistent with love for our neighbor, or even our enemy, of another faith. We need to see the person of a different faith first and foremost as a human being, made in the image of God, whom we are to love for Christ’s sake and with whom we can establish a living, personal friendship. And we need to remember that in any such encounter, even when we have the opportunity to present the biblical faith and explain how and where it differs from, or indeed condemns, all other forms of human religion and idolatry, it is ultimately not us but the Holy Spirit who convinces and convicts people of the truth about God, sin and the Lord Jesus Christ.
So, as we come to consider the true nature of dialogue and what can be said in its favor, we must start from the assumption that it should not and need not compromise our fundamental convictions about Christ and the truth of God’s revelation in Scripture. Only when we are assured that a true Christian dialogue with a non-Christian is not a sign of syncretism but is fully consistent with our belief in the finality of Jesus Christ are we ready to consider the arguments by which it may be commended. They are four.
The Argument for Dialogue
First, true dialogue is a mark of authenticity. Let me quote from the statement of the World Council of Churches assembly at Uppsala, making a point with which I fully agree:
A Christian’s dialogue with another implies neither a denial of the uniqueness of Christ, nor any loss of his own commitment to Christ, but rather that a genuinely Christian approach to others must be human, personal, relevant and humble. In dialogue we share our common humanity, its dignity and fallenness, and express our common concern for that humanity.
If we do nothing but proclaim the gospel to people from a distance, our personal authenticity is bound to be suspect. Who are we? Those listening to us do not know. For we are playing a role (that of the preacher), and for all they know we may be wearing a mask. Besides, we are so far away from them, they cannot even see us properly. But when we sit down alongside them like Philip in the Ethiopian’s chariot, or encounter them face-to-face, a personal relationship is established. Our defenses come down. We begin to be seen and known for what we are. It is recognized that we too are human beings, equally sinful, equally needy, equally dependent on the grace of which we speak. And as the conversation develops, not only do we become known by the other, but we come to know them. They are human beings too, with sins and pains and frustrations and convictions. We come to respect their convictions, to feel with them in their pain. We still want to share the good news with them, for we care about it deeply, but we also care now about the one with whom we want to share it. Dialogue puts evangelism into an authentically human context.
Second, true dialogue is a mark of humility. I do not mean by this that proclamation is always arrogant, for true proclamation is a setting forth of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, and not in any sense or degree a parading of ourselves. What I mean rather is that as we listen to another person, our respect for that person as a human being made in God’s image grows. The distance between us diminishes as we recall that if he or she is fallen and sinful, so are we. Further, we realize that we cannot sweep away all their cherished convictions with a brash, unfeeling dismissal. We have to recognize humbly that some of their misconceptions may be our fault, or at least that their continuing rejection of Christ may be in reality a rejection of the caricature of Christ which they have seen in us or in our fellow Christians. As we listen to that other person, we may have many such uncomfortable lessons to learn. Our attitude changes. There may after all have been some lingering sense of superiority of which we were previously unconscious. But now no longer have we any desire to score points or win a victory. We love the other person too much to boost our ego at their expense. Humility in evangelism is a beautiful grace.
Third, true dialogue is a mark of integrity. For in the conversation we listen to our friend’s real beliefs and problems, and divest our minds of the false images we may have harbored. And we are determined also ourselves to be real. We should both be committed to only one thing—that the truth should emerge. But as a Christian, I know that Christ is the truth, and so I long for Christ himself to “emerge.” But since Christ makes demands on all alike, I may well find that my own understanding and commitment are inadequate. So the dialogue will be challenging to myself as well as to the other person. But it is a matter of personal integrity that I respect the freedom and dignity of my dialogue partner and do not expect of him or her anything I am not willing to ask or hope for myself. Such integrity is essential to true dialogue.
Fourth, true dialogue is a mark of sensitivity. Christian evangelism falls into disrepute when it degenerates into stereotypes. It is impossible to evangelize by fixed formulae. To force a conversation along predetermined lines in order to reach a predetermined destination is to show oneself grievously lacking in sensitivity both to the actual needs of our friend and to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Such insensitivity is therefore a failure in both faith and love. Dialogue is essentially mutual listening in order to understand one another. The Lausanne Covenant contains two references to dialogue. On the one hand it says firmly that we “reject as derogatory to Christ and the gospel every kind of syncretism and dialogue which implies that Christ speaks equally through all religions and ideologies.” But on the other hand, it says with equal firmness that “that kind of dialogue whose purpose is to listen sensitively in order to understand” is actually “indispensable to evangelism.” The principle was stated centuries ago in the book of Proverbs: “If one gives answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame” (Proverbs 18:13).
In conclusion, having looked at some of the arguments against and for the place of dialogue in evangelism, I would like to give examples of it in three different contexts, the first among Hindus in India, the second among Muslims in the Arab world and the third in the industrial areas of Britain.
Dialogue with Hindus
My first example is E. Stanley Jones, an American Methodist missionary in India who flourished between the world wars. He was a prolific writer. His two best-known books, in which he described the principles of his work, are probably The Christ of the Indian Road and Christ at the Round Table.
It was during one of his missions that a Hindu invited him to a tea party in his home in order that he might meet some of the leading Hindus of the local community. They sat in a circle on the floor and talked. Jones asked them what their reaction would be if Christ were to come to India direct, disassociated from Westernism. The mayor of the city interrupted: “I hear you speak about finding Christ. What do you mean by it?” In reply Jones told the story of his conversion. “Now tell me,” said the mayor, “how I could find him.” Out of that conversation Jones’s famous Round Table Conferences grew. He would invite about fifteen adherents of other faiths—mostly educated people like judges, government officials, doctors, lawyers and religious leaders—and five or six Christians, mostly Indians.
In the dialogue that developed, the emphasis was neither on the rival civilizations of East and West, nor on the rival Scriptures of Hindus and Christians, nor even on the rival personalities of Krishna and Christ, but on what each man’s religion meant to him in his own experience. This has been criticized, for example by Hendrik Kraemer, and we cannot help agreeing that human testimony does seem rather to have eclipsed the divine objective testimony to Christ in Scripture. Nevertheless, God honored it. Once a Hindu who had written a savage assault on Christianity, using the latest ammunition supplied by the Rationalistic Association of Britain, of which he was a member, was challenged to speak at a deeper personal level and was immediately disconcerted and silenced. Then a Christian youth with bare feet and wearing simple homespun spoke naturally of what the Lord Jesus meant to him. “There were milleniums of spiritual and social culture between the rest of the group and this youth,” wrote Jones, but no one could gainsay the reality, the authenticity with which he spoke.
Two particular aspects of Stanley Jones’s “Round Table” method impress me. The first is his insistence on fairness and mutual respect. Much Western writing about Hinduism had been very polemical, and had unjustly concentrated on the caste system and on idolatry, child widows and the abuses of temple Hinduism rather than on the philosophic thought of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. “I felt I would be unfair,” wrote Jones, “if I did not let these representatives speak and interpret their own faith. . . . Each was given the chance to say the best he could about his own faith.” At the beginning of each conference Jones would say, “Let everyone be perfectly free, for we are a family circle; we want each one to feel at home, and we will listen with reverence and respect to what each man has to share.” As a result, the old “battle of wits” gave place to an atmosphere of “deep seriousness.” Jones writes,
We have tried to understand sympathetically the viewpoint of the other man. . . .
The deepest things of religion need a sympathetic atmosphere. In an atmosphere of debate and controversy the deepest things, and hence the real things of religion, wither and die. . . .
The Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and found in the end that Christ was not there. They had lost him through the very spirit and methods by which they sought to serve him. Many more modern and more refined crusaders end in that same barrenness of victory.
Yet this does not mean that Jones was indifferent to the results of his Round Table Conferences, for he was an evangelist. The second impressive point about his conferences is that in them all the supremacy of Jesus Christ was apparent.
There was not a single situation that I can remember where before the close of the Round Table Conference Christ was not in moral and spiritual command of the situation.
At the end everything else had been pushed to the edges as irrelevant and Christ controlled the situation. . . .
No-one could sit through these Conferences and not feel that Christ was Master of every situation, not by loud assertion, or through the pleading of clever advocates, but by what he is and does.
At the close of one conference a Hindu said, “Today eight of us have spoken and none of us has found; five of you Christians have spoken and all of you seem to have found. This is very extraordinary.” During another conference a Hindu lawyer got up, took the flowers from the table, walked across the room, laid them at the feet of a Christian, touched his feet and said, “You have found God. You are my guru.”
Dialogue with Muslims
My second example concerns not the Hindu but the Muslim world. There has been an honorable succession of scholarly and dedicated Christian missionaries to Muslims. One has only to mention the names of Henry Martyn, Samuel Zwemer and W. H. Temple Gairdner to realize what great men of God have given their minds and their lives to the task of communicating Christ to the followers of Muhammad. In my own generation one of the best-known names in this field is Bishop Kenneth Cragg. Bishop Cragg’s full statement appears in his book The Call of the Minaret. He interprets the muezzin’s call not only as an explicit summons to prayer addressed to Muslims, but also implicitly as a call to Christians to respond to the challenge of the Muslim world. So his book is divided into two main parts, the first titled “Minaret and Muslim,” in which he expounds the essentials of Muslim belief, and the second “Minaret and Christian,” in which he issues his fivefold call to us—a call to understanding, to service, to retrieval (the attempt to retrieve the situation in which Muslims are so deeply suspicious of Christians), to interpretation and to patience.
In reading the book, two particular emphases have struck me. The first is Cragg’s stress on what he calls “the ambition for understanding.” If we want to be understood, we must first ourselves struggle to understand. And the kind of understanding he envisages is not merely the academic knowledge that may be gained by a study of Islam but the far more intimate awareness that comes from the fullest meeting with Muslims. It is from people, not just from books, that we shall come to understand. The Christian “must strive to enter into the daily existence of the Muslims, as believers, adherents and men.”
To begin with, the Christian must understand what Islam means to the Muslim. We must “seek to know it, as far as may be, from within. We wish to hear at the minaret what it is which greets every rising sun and salutes every declining day for millions of contemporary men, and thus to enter with them across the threshold of the mosque into their world of meaning.” But next the Christian must also understand how Christianity looks to the Muslim. The Christian must feel the shame of the Crusades and of the bitter medieval polemic against Islam, and grasp the Muslim’s abhorrence of Western imperialism and secularism, and his or her utter incomprehension of the West’s unjust espousal of Israel at the Arabs’ expense. The Christian must also strive to understand what Cragg calls the Muslim’s “massive misunderstandings” of Christian theology—of the Christian doctrines of God and the Trinity, of Christ and the cross, and of salvation.
But the minaret’s call to the Christian is not to understanding only. It is also, secondly, to action, and that both negatively and positively. Cragg uses the word retrieval to indicate the work of restitution that we Christians have to perform. “Among the factors contributing to the rise of Islam,” he writes, “was the Christian failure of the Church. It was a failure in love, in purity, and in fervor, a failure of the spirit. . . . Islam developed in an environment of imperfect Christianity,” even of a “delinquent Christianity.” So the Christian
yearns to undo the alienation and to make amends for the past by as full a restitution as he can achieve of the Christ to Whom Islam is a stranger. The objective is not, as the Crusaders believed, the repossession of what Christendom has lost, but the restoration to Muslims of the Christ Whom they have missed. . . .
Let it be clear that the retrieval is not territorial. . . . The retrieval is spiritual. It aims not to have the map more Christian but Christ more widely known. . . . The retrieval does not mean taking back cathedrals from mosques, but giving back the Christ. . . . To restore Christ transcends all else.
Already Cragg’s concept of “retrieval” has become positive. It leads naturally to his next call, which is for interpretation.
If Christ is what Christ is, He must be uttered. If Islam is what Islam is, that “must” is irresistible. Wherever there is misconception, witness must penetrate: wherever there is obscuring of the beauty of the cross it must be unveiled: wherever men have missed God in Christ He must be brought to them again. . . .
We present Christ for the sole, sufficient reason that He deserves to be presented.
So Cragg gives himself to the work of interpretation, and in so doing traverses five major theological areas—the Scriptures, the person of Jesus, the cross, the doctrine of God and the church. Throughout he pleads for patience, for “patience with monumental misunderstandings which must somehow be removed,” indeed for “that travail in patience which is the Christian mission.”
Bishop Stephen Neill writes similarly moving words:
Christians must persist in their earnest invitation to true dialogue; they must exercise endless patience and refuse to be discouraged. And the burden of all their invitation must be “Consider Jesus.” . . . We have no other message. . . . It is not the case that the Muslim has seen Jesus of Nazareth and has rejected him; he has never seen him, and the veil of misunderstanding and prejudice is still over his face.
Dialogue in Industrial Britain
My third example of Christian dialogue brings us to post-Christian Britain, and to the concern of Bishop David Sheppard for the unreached industrial masses of our own country. After serving as a curate in Islington, he then served for eleven years as warden of the Mayflower Family Centre in Canning Town, one of the poorest parts of east London, before becoming bishop of Woolwich in 1969 and then bishop of Liverpool. My quotations are from his book Built as a City. His overriding concern is that
the Church’s life in big cities has been marked by its inability to establish a strong, locally rooted Christian presence among the groups that society leaves without voice or power. . . .
Great efforts have been made over the years by many churches in urban and industrial areas. . . . But in spite of it all locally rooted churches with strong local leadership are rarely to be seen.
Consequently urban mission “is not a marginal subject for Christians” but rather “one of the priorities today in God’s work.” “The gap between Church and world, and especially the world of industry and manual work, is historically wide and contemporaneously massive.” What, if anything, could be done?
Being a modest man, David Sheppard told no dramatic success story. But he did lay down certain basic indigenous principles: “The Church which will make Jesus Christ and His claims a serious adult proposition will need to have at least four characteristics: a Church of and for the area; a believing and worshipping Church; a common life providing unjudging and thought-provoking fellowship, and local leaders and decision-makers.” Then after the principles he gives some illustrations of how an indigenous, working-class church can emerge. He writes first of the need for “bridge-building.” Christians have to care enough to give priority in their time “to join together with other people in the community,” and together to identify and then to tackle some of the important social issues of their own locality.
From bridge building he moves to friendship. He tells us that in 1960 he and his wife, Grace, made a decision: “we set aside every Thursday evening as a couple to meet couples who did not come to church but with whom we had good links.” On alternate Thursdays they visited couples in their homes and entertained couples in their own home.
We said in the invitation that there was a discussion at the end of the evening. In our flat there was always background music, for a visit to a vicar’s home is a nerve-racking adventure for non-church people, and sitting on the edge of chairs in silence is to be avoided. A cup of tea, gossip, sometimes a noisy game called Pit, another cup of tea and some sandwiches and half an hour’s discussion. On evenings like these after some had gone home, and in visits to homes, a high proportion of the best conversations started at 10.30 P.M.
From bridge building through friendship expressed in informal evenings of relaxed discussion they moved to a more serious “searching-group.” “Five couples came. They already had the self-confidence that they would not be thought foolish whatever ideas they expressed. I learned then just how powerful a learning weapon has been created when a ‘talking-group’ has come into being, whose members sense that the others feel the same way about life.” After two and half years, David Sheppard could write, “a number of local couples were convinced Christians.” Canon David Edwards, reviewing the book, commented, “His book is pre-eminently a call to patience in real life and real love. He summons us to keep on keeping on.”
I hope and believe that these three examples, although from very different contexts—Hindu, Muslim and the post-Christian West—all illustrate the same marks of a true Christian dialogue, which I have called authenticity, humility, integrity and sensitivity. Dialogue is a token of genuine Christian love, because it indicates our steadfast resolve to rid our minds of the prejudices and caricatures that we may entertain about other people, to struggle to listen through their ears and look through their eyes so as to grasp what prevents them from hearing the gospel and seeing Christ, to sympathize with them in all their doubts, fears and “hang-ups.” For such sympathy will involve listening, and listening means dialogue. It is once more the challenge of the incarnation, to renounce evangelism by inflexible slogans, and instead to involve ourselves sensitively in the real dilemmas that people face.