Learned Ignorance: Intellectual Humility among Jews, Christians and Muslims
James L. Heft, Reuven Firestone, and Omid Safi
Abstract
Constructive interreligious dialogue is only a recent phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century, most dialogue among believers was carried on as a debate aimed either to disprove the claims of the other, or to convert the other to one's own tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missionaries of different denominations had created such a cacophony amongst themselves in the mission fields that they decided that it would be best if they could begin to overcome their own differences instead of confusing and even scandalizing the people whom they were trying to convert ... More
Constructive interreligious dialogue is only a recent phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century, most dialogue among believers was carried on as a debate aimed either to disprove the claims of the other, or to convert the other to one's own tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missionaries of different denominations had created such a cacophony amongst themselves in the mission fields that they decided that it would be best if they could begin to overcome their own differences instead of confusing and even scandalizing the people whom they were trying to convert. By the middle of the twentieth century, the horrors of the Holocaust compelled Christians, especially mainline Protestants and Catholics, to enter into a serious dialogue with Jews, one of the consequences of which was the removal of claims by Christians to have replaced Judaism, and revising text books that communicated that message to Christian believers. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many branches of Christianity, not least the Catholic Church, are engaged in a world-wide constructive dialogue with Muslims, made all the more necessary by the terrorist attacks of September 11. In these new conversations, Muslim religious leaders took an important initiative when they sent their document, “A Common Word Between Us,” to all Christians in the West. It is an extraordinary document, for it makes a theological argument (various Christians in the West, including officials at the Vatican, have claimed that a “theological conversation” with Muslims is not possible) based on texts drawn from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qurʾan, that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers share the God-given obligation to love God and each other in peace and justice.
Keywords:
Protestant Christian missionaries,
Protestants,
Catholics,
interreligious dialogue,
Jews,
Judaism,
Christianity,
Muslims,
September 11,
the West
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199769308 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199769308.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
James L. Heft, editor
Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, US
Reuven Firestone, editor
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Professor of Medieval Jewish and Islamic Studies, US
Omid Safi, editor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Professor of Religious Studies, US
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