Through Dialogue & Collaboration

In the developing, multireligious societies of Asia, struggling towards liberation and wholeness, all religions are called to provide a common and complementary moral and religious foundation for this struggle, and to be forces for growth and communion rather than sources of alienation and conflict. They can do this only through dialogue and collaboration. The religions have a prophetic role in public life. They should not become victims either of those who seek them apolitical and private, or of those who seek to instrumentalise them for political and communal ends.

 

Cradle of the Great Religions

The Asian bishop’s have spoken of evengelisation in Asia as involing a threefold dialogue with the poor, the cultures and the religions of Asia. Of these three aspects of Asian reality, religions seem particularlysignificant because Asia has been the cardle of the Great Religions. These are still very alive and active, and are even in a process of revival  and reneval, trying to meet the challenges of a new life in the post-colonial era faced with the double challenge of modern science and technology, on the on hand, and the contact with western culture, on the other. What should be the ompact of this religious pluralism on the life of the peoples os Aisa?

Prophetic Role of Religion

Religion is the deepest element of culture. It seeks to answer the ultimate question of people. It provides inspiration, clarifies goals and offers strength to persons and communities in their pursuit of fulfilment on life. Referring to their orgin and their end, it challenges people to grow towards wholeness in all the ereas of their existence. It offers guidance for moral behaviour both to persons and to communities.

Religion thus has a prophetic role both in provate and public life. Contemporary secularising trends seek to reduce religion to a private affair that has no role in public life. Public life, that is the economic, social and political life of people, is then regulated by secular ideals, like peace, happiness, order, efficiency, etc. uncontrolled by moral principles that find their ultimate roots in religion, these ideals soon degenerate into individual and collective selfishness, unbridled competition leading to the survival of the fittest, consumerism, pursuit of profit, ect. When religion is no longer relevant to public life in this way, it can soon become meaningless and alienating.

 In the opposite direction, the emotional force of religion, interpreted in a fundamentalist sense, can be used to forge a group indentity that becomes defensive and detrimental to other group identites. Religion thus becomes a tool of politics, communalism, fundamentalism, ect. It becomes a source of conflict. Avoiding these two excesses, religion has to perserve its unipque, inspirational and prophetic role even in public life.

Mutural Acceptance and Active Collaboration

In contemporary societies, where there is a desire to respect human dignity and freedom, everyone, both as a person and as a member of a group, has an inalienable right to freedom. The conscience of each person is sacred and is to be respected. In a multireligious society, like the ones in Asia, this multural respect must show itself not only in tolerance, but also in mutural acceptance and active collaboration.

As a group facing a common destiny and linked by common economic, social and political bonds, if religions are to avoid privatisation, they have to make themselves relevant to public life. If they respect each other’s faith conviction, this can be done only in a dialogue that creates a community which ollows each person to root the basic values on which it is founded in his or her own religious faith, but which also seeks to build up a consensus concerning these values as a foundation for public life and its economic, social and political institutions.

Such a collective foundation, involving a certain give-and-take, seems both inevitable and necessary, if we wish to build up a multireligious community that takes seriously the positive role of religion in private and public life, without privatising religion and thus leading, on the one hand, to an areligious, amoral society, and without making, on the other hand, religion the principal fator that holds a society together.

 

Union between People and with God

In a address in 1986, Pope John Paul II said : “The fruit of dialogue is union between people and union of people with God, who is the source and revealer of all truth and whose Spirit guides people in freedom only when they meet one another in al honesty and love. By dialogue, we let God by present in our midst; for as we open ourselves in dialogue to one another, we also open ourselves to God. We should use the legitimate means of human fiendliness, mutual inderstanding and interior persuasion. As followers of different religions, we should join together in promoting and defending common ideals in the spheres of religious liberty, human brotherhood, education, culture, social welfare and civic order.”

Community and Complementarity

Such a perspective supposes that we have a positive view of the role of religion in society which does not reduce it either to an alienating opium or to an oppressive superstructure. Moreover, religions are no longer seen as simply oppsed to each other and thus discouraging coexistence, but as having a basic community that makes dialogue and conversation possible, and a complementarity which promotes mutural enrichment and leads to a fulfilment in the future that calls for a conmitment, while respecting that absolute demands of the faith of each one. Such community and complementarity are seen as the characteristics of a group of persons, their experience and commitment, and not as a note of their doctrines and structures.

Common Pilgrimage

The context of this dialogue is the struggle of the Asian people towards liberation and wholeness. This provides a dynamic perspective oriented to a future that has to be built up by  the people together. Without ignoring the many obstacles and oppressions, both personal and structural, that have to be overcome, the stress is on a common search, a common pilgrimage, a growth in communion towards realisation and fullness, variously expressed as moksha, nirvana, pleroma, haven, ect.

At the Service of the World

“Since the religions, as the Church, are at the service of the world, interreligious dialogue cannot be confined to the religious sphere, but must embrace all dimensions of life : economic, sociopolitical, cultural and religious. Its is in their common commitment to the fuller life of the human community that they discover their complementarity and the urgency and relevance of dialogue at all levels.”

 

FABC – Theological Advisory Commission Documents

                                    1986-1992

DIALOGUE ?, Resource manual for CATHOLICS IN ASIA, 2001, p.85-86.

Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs

Federation of Asian bishop’s conferences

Editor Edmund Chia, FSC