Shadow Boxing: The Missionary Encounter with Christian Theology in World Religions
The above paragraph points to weaknesses and potential weaknesses in advocacy for inter-religious dialogue. It seems that only recently has consideration been given over the key question of what language should be used in dialogue. Default plumping for Western languages because they are ‘global’ easily creates the dialogue concerned. I have mentioned resource questions – ‘poor’ religions are unlikely to refuse dialogue that promises material reward. People are unlikely to deny having a ‘religion’ if possession of it is in their economic interests. Experts in that ‘religion’ may well be paid to dialogue with the West. Leaders of the ‘religions’ will benefit in various ways from the structures they are leading. Encouraging inter-religious dialogue can be paying people to be other-than Christian. The lively arena of dialogue that such categories and such activity can provide can be of the nature of a smoke screen that prevents the Gospel from penetrating local contexts and cultures. Western missionaries who engage in ministry using indigenous languages avoid many of the aforementioned pit falls. Vulnerable mission (using local languages and local resources) keeps a missionary in a position of being vulnerable to the actual vicissitudes of the life of the people he is reaching, avoiding being submerged in issues created by colonialism and Western languages.
Part of the real reason for the discrediting of comparative theology in the early decades of the twentieth century should now be becoming clear. Later comparatists, instead of dealing with the actuality of the lives of people outside of the Christian West, were forced to engage with world religions that were in effect creations of western theologians. The ‘world religions’ they engaged with, modelled on Christianity, had built up resistance to the criticism implicit in the comparison with them. From the Western point of view, world religions were resilient to the heretical alternatives of the Christian traditions that had designed their modern clothes.
Conclusion
Inter-religious dialogue can accentuate the apparent actuality of reifications of Western creations known as world religions. Powerful religious and secular leaders use such reifications in their own interests. The same have the effect of blocking Gospel truth. The work of comparative theologians that had been all of the rage in the 19th century was undermined by the Christian scaffolding of created world religions. Today, comparison between religions produces the same problem. Yet within those world religious groupings, and within areas of the world not yet considered to have their own world religions, are hurting people whom God loves. This article advocates that Western missionaries should seek to bypass the barriers to Christian ministry created by their Western forefathers, to reach the hearts of hurting people around the world with the Gospel of Jesus. World ‘religions’ (and other ‘religions’) that have been created as a result of vagaries of translation into Western languages have minimal existence in indigenous tongues. The true heart and state of people can be perceived and reached when one engages them using their own languages.
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Notes
[1] “If there was any single belief that characterized the Victorian era it was Christian belief. Religion pervaded social and political life to an extent almost unimaginable today” Evans commented in 2011.
[2] Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, (Masuzawa 2005:3), and Sikhism (2005:262)).
[3] Note that the very term ‘world religion’ was once used specifically to refer only to Christianity, that was considered at the time to be the only ‘world religion’ (Masuzawa 2005:119).
[4] In this article I do focus on English language literature, especially that produced in the UK and the USA.
[5] I do consider secularism itself to have very specific theological roots (see Harries 2015 and Harries 2016), meaning to say that the history was secular is to say that it was also theological.
[6] I taught part-time at this school from 1997 to 2011.
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