Interreligious Dialogue and Evangelism

"Interreligious Dialogue and Evangelism" by Terry C. Muck, Buddhist-Christian Studies,
Issue 17 - 1997, p139.

Abstract:
The communication theory of David Krieger enables us to recognize different levels of discourse in the interreligious dialogue setting. Argumentation, proclamation, and disclosure can be seen as complementary if the affective dimension of dialogue (a dimension that includes respect, goodwill, sincerity, honesty) is emphasized. These aspects of the affective dimension cannot be "manufactured" on the human level but must be referenced to a transndent realm.

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It is frightening for me to talk about evangelism and interreligious dialogue, more particularly the relationship between the two. I don't mean it is just frightening to me personally, threatening to me as a person, although I will admit to a certain tentativeness about the topic: I don't like to be misunderstood, and this topic is easily misunderstood.

No, it is frightening because it is such an important issue and one so vulnerable to abuse. The all or nothing advocates on both sides of the issue (Evangelism is the one and only way and Interreligious dialogue is the one and only way) sometimes close off conversation about the topic in an unhealthy way.

Yet we must talk about it. It is such an important topic because we are in essence talking about the ways different religious groups relate to one another, and in a world that is filled with interreligious strife, we must develop ways of relating that both lead to peace and allow us to be true to the convictions of our respective religions. Anything less is a sellout to physical violence, psychological warfare, or intellectual and spiritual suicide.

I believe both evangelism and interreligious dialogue are extremely important functions of all religious systems, and a place must be found for both in any religion that claims truth in this day and age.

Interreligious dialogue and evangelism are different modes of communication, both important, neither one more important than the other. In Christian terms, both are commanded by the teachings of the Bible. In my understanding, one cannot be a good Christian without demanding that the Christian church be dedicated to both dialogue and evangelism.

I propose to argue for this position by using a paradigm offered by a communications theory scholar, David Krieger.

The Challenge of Interreligious Dialogue

The first challenge of understanding interreligious dialogue in a theological context is to answer the question What is interreligious dialogue? I raise the question because one reads various answers in the scholarly literature. One of three answers is usually given to this question: interreligious dialogue as a communication methodology,[1] as an intellectual strategy[2] and as a teleological argument.[3] I'd like to add a fourth answer, interreligious dialogue as an emotion or attitude toward people of other religious traditions.[4] Then, rather than choosing between the four, I suggest they can work together for good. But first let me give short summaries of these four approaches.

Interreligious dialogue as a communication methodology is one of the most recent and popular of the approaches right now, and one I will rely heavily on in my analysis of the problem in the last half of this paper. David Krieger, cofounder of the Institute for Communication Research in Meggen, Switzerland, summed up this approach very well in an article in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, "Communication Theory and Interrrligious Dialogue.'' Krieger's and others' communication views begin with the problem of interreligious conflict and suggest that its solution is to learn to talk with one another more productively. Interreligious conversation, however, has some special features that make it a particularly sophisticated form of communication.[5] Different views of God or the Transcendent and different theologies make dialogue a high stakes game. One way to make such interactions productive is to analyze religious differences not in terms of truth but in terms of communication problems and dynamics, and then solve them as such.[6] We will see how he suggests that we do it in a moment.

A second way of approaching dialogue is as an intellectual strategy. German sociologist Jurgen Habermas, in his magisterial two-volume Theory of Communicative Action, suggests that rational dialogue is the paradigm by which social systems can be effectively built in our pluralistic day and age.[7] Although he does not deal with interreligious dialogue per se, it is not difficult to see members of different religious traditions using his concepts of communicative action, rationality, and social meaning to forge understandings that will provide social cohesion rather than discord. Dialogue in this understanding is not just a methodology but the essence of human social constructions.

A third way of approaching interreligious dialogue is one proposed by several, but perhaps most helpfully by David Tracy in his Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue. For Tracy, dialogue is not just a communication strategy or a principle of rational social cohesion, it is an end in itself. In a world where we cannot agree on ultimate religious principles, political philosophies, economic strategies, or anything else, because every attempt we make at such is constantly being changed by cultural and historical forces, the only permanent stake in the ground is dialogue itself, where truth is constantly unfolded and changed by the ongoing conversation.[8]

I'd like to add a fourth way of looking at interreligious dialogue and that is as an expression of a fundamental emotion or attitude toward people who believe differently on the most important aspects of life. It seems to be extraordinarily difficult for human beings to disagree agreeably about simple things, such as what kind of car to drive, who cooks the best pizza, and what seminary to attend. It is almost impossible for people to disagree agreeably about really important things like religion. In this sense, I'd like to suggest interreligious dialogue is an emotion or attitude toward other people that not only allows for differences, but also postulates them and accepts them as fact, but not as truth. Although I disagree with much of what he has to say regarding the relationship between dialogue and evangelism, on this point I do agree with Stanley Samartha when he says, "Dialogue is a mood, a spirit, an attitude of love and respect towards neighbors of other faiths. It regards partners as persons, not statistics."[9]

My thesis is that, like the rest of theology, this emotional aspect of interreligious dialogue is too often left out and is one of the reasons interregligious dialogue is such a controversial subject. A corollary of this thesis is that, because of the difficulty of this task, we may have to learn some new "emotions" in order to do this.[10] We have what I think are very convincing arguments about the theory and rationality of dialogue, and we have people effectively doing it and teaching others the techniques of dialogue. But still we resist. I think that we resist because we don't feel the passion for it. The affective dimension has been shortchanged. We need to retrain ourselves in having this kind of feeling for others, the dialogical feeling.

Now, how to talk about this. Let me suggest that one way to do it is to go back and take another look at Krieger's suggestions from the point of view of communication theory. I like this approach because it does begin the discussion at a "technological" level and should be nonthreatening from an ideological standpoint, at least at the beginning. I also like it because it forces us, in the end to deal with what I think is the real problem facing interreligious dialogue, the lack of attention paid to its affective elements. Rut for reasons I shall mention later, we cannot start with the real problem. We must begin at a less threatening place and must approach the real problem only obliquely.

A Pragmatic Theory of Communication

Krieger's "pragmatic theory of communication" is an ideal vehicle for this oblique approach.[11] Let me try to summarize it: Every communicative act has embedded in it three interrelated levels of communication.

The Argumentation Level

The first level is the argumentation level which consists of a set of moves designed to present a convincing discussion and has a good chance of doing so if all parties to the conversation share the same basic communication rules and boundaries. Another way of saying this is to say that two people have a satisfying communication if everyone involved shares the same worldview. For example, if all parties accept the validity of Aristotelian logic and deductive paradigms of thought, then it is possible to argue to some kind of resolution from presuppositions to conclusion. Within this commonly accepted worldview, the parties are seeking to find "objective" truth that will be universally evident and are going to learn and grow through one's mistakes in argumentation as pointed out by other parties in the conversation or the conversation itself. The model social system that embodies this kind of approach to communication is the realm of science and the scientific method.[12]

The Proclamation Level

The second level of discourse is engaged when it becomes obvious that the topic of conversation leads the participants into areas where there is not agreement over the rules and boundaries of the communication, where worldviews differ enough so that arguments and presuppositions, like gears unattached to one another, do not mesh. One participant, for example, argues by the rules of Aristotelian logic, while another argues from the inward senses of personal experience.[13] In such a conversation, one person can make a perfectly valid argument according to the rules of his or her "system" and receive nothing but blank stares from the other participants for whom the rules are different. The potential for misunderstanding and frustration multiply especially in cross cultural situations. Krieger gives the following example:

Suppose an ethnologist studying a traditional society is confronted with talk about witches and oracles. Within a certain worldview, a misfortune, such as the sudden collapse of a house, can understandably be attributed to witchcraft. In a society such as this, there will be a set of procedures for verifying whether or not someone is a witch-for example, consulting an oracle.... When the ethnologist objects that the entire language game of determining who is a witch is meaningless, since magical causes do not exist and since it can be proved that the house collapsed because mice had eaten through the supporting ropes, the natives merely ask the further question of why mice ate through the ropes of this particular person's house at this particular time. The ethnologist might say that this specific series of events is accounted for by the scarcity of the normal food sources for mice, by the nearness of this particular house to the forest and so on. The natives could accept all these facts without acknowledging their explanatory value, for they can still ask why all this occurred at this particular time and place. (Witchcraft, for them, might still be the ultimate cause.) [14]

It is clear, at this point, that the argumentative level of discourse is ineffective until the second level, which Krieger calls the proclamation level, can be addressed. The participants must reach some kind of understanding regarding the rules and boundaries of the discourse, and at this level, each argues for his or her own rules and boundaries. The goal of this kind of communication, quite different from the argumentation level, is not to verify an argument, but to convert the conversation partner to a way of looking at the world. Participants witness to their particular set of rules and boundaries and are seeking to bring others who don't share those rules and boundaries to join those who do. A scientist (or the ethnologist in our example) is not trying to articulate a scientific argument at the proclamation level, but is trying to get the indigenous person to become a "scientist," or at least someone who accepts the dogmas of science. In a discussion about religion, of course, the various religionists would be doing the same.[15]

The Disclosure Level

If conversion doesn't take place at the second level of proclamation, then a third level is engaged that allows for a possible change of rules. Krieger calls this the level of disclosure. For the purpose of conversation it does away with all boundaries and accepts all possibilities of transcendence.[16] A participant in this type of discourse "does not exclude the other (person's) view of reality and is open to an ongoing transformational process."[17] Unlike second-level discourse, which repeats the tried and true truths of one's worldview or religion in an attempt to convince the other, third-level discourse strives for creative, new, unique language, trying to put together the elements in a new way.The horizon is universal but not universal in the sense of argumentation whose universality is contingent on a particular worldview, but a universality of all being. Whereas first-level discourse is typified by science and second-level discourse by ideology and religion, third-level discourse is the level of art, mystery, and wisdom.[18]

Third-level discourse is also the level of interreligious dialogue, says Krieger. If discussions stay at the second level and conversion doesn't take place, then the conversation falls into "sterility and meaninglessness." Communication won't take place because each will he talking what amounts to a private language. Instead, a new space must be opened up for conversation. Second-level beliefs are not done away with, but they must not be allowed to prohibit a space of conversation where anything goes, because at this level "all paths, every means of access to creative inspiration, all spiritual techniques, and all religions and ideologies are equally true and effective."[19]

Analysis

This paradigm of communicative action is a good one. In a world desperately in need of conversation between increasingly segmented islands of ethnicity, culture, and nationalities, any methodology that will help create space for peaceful conversations must be embraced. Krieger's communicative analysis recognizes that these different levels of communicative action exist in every conversation and that recognition makes it possible to understand many of the inconsistencies of conversation that go on, and gives us a tool that helpfully analyzes problems as they arise. If I could give a very simple example: in the past two years, my oldest two sons have gotten their driving licenses. As each got his license, I was confronted with well articulated arguments from each about why we needed to buy a new car, preferably a Ford Bronco or a new pick-up truck. The conversations are not great examples of effective communication. My sons' arguments are good, logical presentations at the argumentation level; I'd like to think my arguments are good, logical presentations at the argumentation level. But in spite of being good arguments, we seem to be incapable of hearing one another's arguments and coming to any kind of a consensus understanding-at the argumentation level. What we need to realize is that our real discussion is taking place at the second level, the proclamation level. My sons have a set of rules and boundaries for their arguments that differ from mine. Theirs include presuppositions such as, "The standard for possessions is what our peers have in the way of possessions," "We should satisfy our wants and desires as much as possible," and "Parents who really love their children give them what they want." My rules and boundaries are different: "The standards for possessions should be based on family income and a Christian spirit of responsible consumption,'' "Wants and desires are not to be trusted," and "Parents who really love their children don't give them everything they want." The conversations I have with my sons regarding new cars are mostly at this second level of mutually advocating our respective worldvicws. As long as we recognize this, we at least understand one another. I haven't clued them in to the fact that there is this third level where all rules and boundaries are negotiable, at least in the way Krieger articulates it, or perhaps it is better to say I haven't done this because of the way Krieger articulates it.

Why? The reason is this: Although Krieger allows that in every conversation, even a conversation between two scientists who clearly share one another's commitment to a worldview (in this case the scientific method), all three levels of conversation are operative or potentially operative, but it is clear that Krieger thinks that these three levels are not equal, that a hierarchy exists in their relation to one another, and that the highest form of communication is the third form of communication, the discourse of disclosure. Krieger calls this the "higher, third level of discourse,"[20] and he evaluates the other two levels in the context of the third: "what is usually termed 'religious language' is primarily determined by second-level pragmatics, but that, for a religion to he truly meaningful, it must be 'spoken' and communicated by means of the third-level pragmatics of disclosure." It is this normative stance on the part of Krieger that moves his communicative paradigm from the level of useful communicative technique into the realm of ideology itself and makes it problematic for people who don't accept his rules and boundaries for this discussion of rules and boundaries.[21]

Now what can are do about that? We could reject all of his analysis, but I think that is throwing the baby out with the bath water. I think there is a great deal of potential in this analysis for promoting and doing effective interreligious dialogue, and for finding a place for both argumentation and proclamation also. So I would like to explore options for salvaging as much as we can from this paradigm, even if we don't accept Krieger's underlying, proclamation-level ideology.

One way to do this would be to reorder the hierarchy. If the disclosure level seems an important level of conversation to retain, a place where we can safely do interreligious dialogue, then let's by all means keep it, but simply not give it the highest place. Let's instead give it the lowest place and rather than say that boundary-less conversation is the highest and best kind of conversation, let's say it is the lowest, weakest form of conversation. By all means let's agree that it is necessary, useful, and inherent in every conversation, and that it provides us a place where we can disagree agreeably, and that because it does that it is extremely important. But let's admit that it betrays a weakness of thinking that at some point must be gone beyond. Boundary-less conversation, while essential and important, is really a means of delaying stepping up to the really important questions of truth and justice and the human way. Not all answers are right, not all forms of human behavior are just, and we need to agree on that and the only way to ultimately agree on that is to agree on rules and boundaries or second-level proclamations, and then at the highest level of thinking draw out the implications of those rules and boundaries, through argumentation, in applying them to everyday life. In other words, let's retain all three levels of Krieger's conversational pyramid, but simply invert the pyramid when it comes to ideologically evaluating them.

This means that we could still do interreligious dialogue, that is provide space for such conversations. Dialogue would be extremely important for many reasons. It would help create conversations that would lead to peace among the religions. It would provide ideas, creative new ideas that would have the potential to change rules and boundaries at the seconcd level, and thus practical arguments at the third level. But it would not be seen as the highest level of conversation.

This would actually be more consistent with the findings of social scientists about how humans actually learn. In the realm of developmental psychology, as just one example, argumentation according to well-articulated and coherent operating principles is a sign of higher, later, and well-developed learning, while instinct and intuition are the earliest, most fundamental, and basic types of learning.[22] It would also be more in tune with evolutionary and progressive types of schemes for humankind's development.[23]

Or it might be possible to reorder the three levels in a different way still. We could make the proclamation level the highest level and the disclosure level the first, lowest level, and put the argumentative level in the midtlle. This might better fit the worldview of evangelical Christians for whom "proclamation" of the "rules and boundaries" of the Christian faith in the form of biblical truth or the Apostle's Creed or Karl Barth's theology is the highest good.[24] Rut Krieger's paradigm would remind us that proclamation is not the only way we should relate or do relate.[25] We must have open ended conversations with those who don't share our rules and boundaries, because out of those conversations come new ideas for actually implementing values in culture, which could profitably feed the second level of argumentation. In this scheme, both the disclosure level and the proclamation level would helpfully inform the middle, argumentation level, without pretending that it is the most important.

It is obvious that I am trying to avoid what many do when faced with these three different kinds of discourse-that is chose one and say it is the only one, or if not the only one, it is the only one we should practice. Let others do the other two if they want, but for us, Evangelical Christians tend to do this in practice for the second level, the proclamation level. Rationalists like Habermas tend to do this for the first level, the argumentation level. Pluralists and relativists tend to do this for the third level, the disclosure level.

I am for keeping the three kinds of discourse, but recognize that none of them is front rank, that it is impossible to rank them absolutely. What ranking that does take place in discrete conversations is variable and contingent.

The Absolute And The Relative

Instead I think we need to see these three levels of discourse as all important, but none more important than the others. They are simply three different modes of relating to other human beings.[26] One is engaged in making decisions about effective action and policy. One is engaged in discussing rules and boundaries of discourse itself. One is engaged in relating to all human beings, no matter what their worldview or point of view. Different, complementary, necessary. All three of them.

Of course, to put them all on one level like that means that there does have to be some superintendent principle that gives them meaning. In Krieger's ranking (and my two alternative examples of ranking), the highest ranked form of communication becomes the superintendent principle because of its status as the highest form of communication. If, on the other hand, all three are simply pragmatic conditions of communication, none better than the others, then something has to be postulated to say why we should communicate in ways that lead to worldviews, human practices, and good, accepting, humane relationships with other human beings. If you are to rank these three modes, as Krieger has done (or as I have done in the re-ranking), then the problem of meaning is solved. The highest ranked mode of discourse is the one that expresses the highest value for that worldview. It is quite simple to see, in reading Krieger's article and his descriptions of the three modes, which he thinks is most important. What is most important (but not exclusively important) is that human beings respect one another and what they think. The value supersedes two other very important values, proclamation of one's worldview and arguing for applications of that worldview.

But if you simply say that these three goods are all goods, none better than the other, then you need some absolute meaning to attach to these three meanings that turn out to be of relative importance. Where might one find such a meaning? If Krieger has given us a paradigm of communicative action that is as comprehensive as it seems, then it seems we must look elsewhere for our meaning. "Elsewhere" meaning to some realm that supersedes human existence. I think that is exactly what we must do. I think it is possible to nitpick Krieger's paradigm in regard to its inclusivity, but it would be difficult to design a better one. So I am willing to stipulate that until a better one comes along (and it will, I suppose), this one exhausts areas of meaning in human existence. Where, then, does our meaning come from?

Perhaps it could come from outside the realm of human existence, that is, some kind of transcendent principle. These are the religious principles of God, gods, and Ultimate Values. Further, they cannot just be projected values, human values writ large and then personified to make them marketable among the masses. No, they must be entities that exist and act independently of our existence and our actions.

Of course, from our point of view, the existence of such beings can only be hypothesized. We can never prove God. If we could, the God we would prove would be less than God, a being subject to our reasoning and experiencing powers. No, the hypothesis must be of an ultimate, unprovable God. Yet it must be a God who wants us to know him/her/it, for such an ultimate being cannot be known othenwise.

It must be this kind of God or transcendent principle that gives meaning to our three modes of discourse. We argue, proclaim, and relate to and with other people, because this superior thing wants it. God displays this desire by first relating to us, by first proclaiming to us, by first arguing with us. God made us to do the same in return, first with God, then with each other. This is where we find meaning for our three equally valuable modes of discourse.

The Goal of Interreligious Dialogue

Let me sum up by posing the question "Why don't we do interreligious dialogue with more passion?" and then answering that question in a way that illustrates the communicative paradigm I just described.

Why don't we do interreligious dialogue with more passion? First, I think that for those that have ears to hear, at least, the intellectual case has been made very well for dialogue. In theory. It seems consistent with fundamental principles of Christian theology (for example, love your neighbor as yourself and love your enemy), with the humanistic teachings of both philosophy and the social sciences, and with good common sense. We don't need more convincing theory, although we always need to be revising and updating our theoretical constructs.

Second, I think the practical need for dialogue is obvious, and I think the techniques for effective dialogue have been developed and proven to work. In order to be convinced of the need for dialogue in both our "local" United Stares network of cultures and the worldwide web of cultures, one simply needs to read the New York Times for a month. Such a reading will reveal a plethora of interreligious conflict and conflict influenced by religious factors, that it would be perverse to come away from such a reading without being convinced of the need for some method of peaceful conversation between people of different religions, one way of defining interreligious dialogue. Further, there is no shortage of books and pamphlets on how to do dialogue. Technique has never been a weak point of Western civilization arrd interreligious dialogue is no exception. If you want to know how to dialogue, you can learn.

Thus we are faced with a situation where intellectually and practically most of us are convinced of the case for dialogue. But we don't do it. Or if we do it, we do it tepidly. Or we talk about it with approval, but when it comes to making time to actually sit down with someone of another religion or another viewpoint and talk, we find that we are too busy. What is missing?

I think the element that is missing is the emotional element, the affective dimension. We tend to use the emotion most relevant to interreligious dialogue-commitment-only in a negative sense. We use it to champion our own religion but not to engage those different from us in positive conversation. There are three challenges we must meet in order to actualize this:

1. We must overcome the enemy principle. Group cohesion requires enemies. A great deal has been written ahout the importance of clearly identifying the opposition to one's movement in order to stimulate greater devotion to the cause. It is very obvious in the political sphere these days, where the Unired States's traditional "eneny"-Eastern block communism-has become a largely discredited movement, the Eastern block itself has been broken up in numerous "blocklets," and we find ourselves enemyless, at least on the level of a single monolithic threat. Into this "enemy vacuum" we see rushing several candidates: modern China, Japan, environmental degradation, and the Islamic/Arabic world. Our church institutions tend to follow the pattern of our political ones. We create enemies-godless communism, materialism, secular humanism-because there is no better way to pull a group together.

In the interreligious sense, however, there are several obvious major drawbacks to this. First, in order to create these enemy forces on the scale required to make them a legitimate world threat, it is usually necessary to demonize them to a significant degree. An enemy on the order called for must have totally malicious intentions toward us and the forces of good and right. Of course, interreligious dialogue is impossible in an atmosphere where the "other" side is a demonic force. There is only one way to deal with a demonic force and that is to neutralize or defeat it. The second drawback is this: It makes commitment a negative force rather than a positive one. Commitment to one's own religion takes on battlefield overtones. Commitment becomes totally associated with darkness and sacrifice. To be sure, language of the joy and light that it will lead to at the end of time is often employed. But for now and the foreseeable future, the language is negative. We are committed not because of the love of God for us, but because we are good soldiers of God marching out to fight Satan's forces. It is no wonder commitment takes on the overtones of fanaticism when used by our religious institutions in this way. A more effective factoring in of the positive Christian emotions into our theology (love, hope, gratitude, etc.) would help address this.

2. We must broaden the traditional concept of the missionary urge. All religions are missionary movements to some extent. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam are more intentional about it. When one is seeking to promote membership in a religious group by arguing for its truth and efficacy, a we/they mentality is unavoidable. This is what makes the relationship between evangelism and dialogue so problematic. We need to more clearly articulate the relationship between evangelism and interreligious dialogue, a relationship that I have suggested is not either/or.

3. We must build on and move beyond our Enlightenment. The move during the Enlightenment from a worldview that emphasized revelation and church authority to one that emphasized reason and individual choice has been well documented. It was a good move in that it addressed diffcult issues of misused church authority; it was a defining move in that it to a large extent made us what we are today. We cannot undo the Enlightenment by going back to a purer time.

But like all stages of human development, it was incomplete, anticipating more complete, fuller ways of understanding what it means to be counted in God's image. More fully integrating and appreciating the role emotions play in theology and human relationships and interreligious dialogue is a step we must take together.

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This article was reproduced by Apologia with permission.

Buddhist-Christian Studies (Univ. of Hawaii Press), (808) 956-8833

Special thanks to Jennifer Kambas for scanning the original into raw text form and the rigorous editing which followed.

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Notes:

1. David Krieger, "Communication Theory and Interreligious Dialogue," Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Summer-Fall 1993): 331-353.

2. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).

3. David Tracy, Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue (Louvain: Peeters Press, 1990).

4. I began to sketch this out in an article, "The New Testament Basis for Interreligious Dialogue." Insights (Fall 1994): 7-21.

5. Krieger, "Communication Theory," pp. 331-332.

6. Krieger, for example, suggests his attempt, based on communications theory, is helpfully informed by insights from the philosophy of science, information theory, systems theory, semiotic, and sociology (Ibid., p. 332).

7. Habermas suggests that sociology has had to step in the breach left by philoophy's abdication of attempting to answer totalizing questions and religion's inability to do so convincingly: "How can sociology claim any competence of rationality problematic we have to bear in mind that philosophical thought, which has surrendered the relation to totality, also loses its self-sufficiency" (Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1; Reason and the Rationalization of Society, p. 2).

8. Tracy recognizes that pure rationality will not work: "The Enlightenment notion of rationality is in grave danger of becoming part of the problem, not the solution." His solution is a combination of the "mystico-prophetic voice of the Christian tradition," combining prophetic "rationality" with the mystics experience. But such a fluctuating voice can only be heard in the dialogical process (Dialogue with the Other, p. 1) "Dialogue demands the intellectual, moral and at the limit, religious ability to struggle to hear another and to respond" (p. 4).

9. Stanley Samartha, Courage for Dialogue: Ecumenical Issues in Inter-Religious Relationships (Geneva: WCC, 1981), p. 100.

10. Lee Yearley seems to be for something similar, although he calls them virtues. See "New Religious Virtues and the Study of Religion," the Fifteenth Annual Lecture in Religion at Arizona State University, 1994.

11. Krieger tells us why communication theory is ideal: "The boundaries of these disciplines (theology, social science, history of religion, and philosophy)-for example, the theologian's faith commitment to his or her own revelatory sources, the ethnologist's commitment to objective knowledge, and the historians's concern with the continuity of a specific tradition-in fact hinder both an adequate analysis of the problem and the discovery of a solution. An interdisciplinary approach from the point of view of a general theory of comtnunication could prove more promising" ("Communication Theory," p. 332).

12. Ibid., pp. 334, 337-339.

13. Alasdair MacIntyre sums up this dilemma well in the introduction to his book, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 1-5.

14. Krieger, "Communication Theory," p. 334-335.

15. Ibid., pp. 335-336, 339-344.

16. Much of Krieger's discussion in this section sounds like much of what John Cobb talks about in the transformation that takes place in true interreligious dialogue. See, for example, Cobb's article, "Being a Transformationist in a Pluralistic World," Christian Century (August 10-17, 1994): 748-751.

17. Krieger, "Communication Theory." p. 336.

18. Ibid., pp. 336, 344-351.

19. Ibid., p. 346.

20. Ibid., p. 336.

21. That this is an ideology is obvious from the discussion, but is best noted in Krieger's comments about Habermas's rationalistic (overly so, in Krieger's opinion) position: "The limitation of communicative action to argumentation, a shortcoming shared by Habermas as well (along with C. S. Peirce and Josiah Royce), results in transforming universal communicative solidarity into an unreachable ideal that can be made concretely effective only by idolizing present-day scientific methodology (Ibid., p. 338, footnote 11).

22. See, for example, Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1951). In Erikson's theory of childhood development, our understandings of cosmic order and who "God" is come very early and ideological understandings only take shape in adolescence, while actually coping with the problems of humankind become characteristic of older adults. One way of reading this developmental scheme turns Krieger's hierarchy on its head.

23. See, for example, the works of Tielhard de Chardin.

24. See for example, Robert Coleman, The Master Plan of Salvation (Westwood, NJ: Revell, 1963), although it might be more accurate to say that many evangelicals are more in favor of a scheme that emphasized just one level of discourse, the proclamation level. See R.T. Kendall, Stand Up and Be Counted: Calling for Public Confession of Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing Company, 1984).

25. William Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans Company, 1989).

26. I suppose that we could easily lapse into Trinitarian understandings and arguments here. And they might be useful, at a sort of functional level. The obvious difference would be relative nature of these modes as compared to the absolute yet mysterious nature of the Trinity.

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For further reading:

"Is There Common Ground Among Religions?" by Terry C. Muck -- an excellent example of introducing a question to which the average person expects a black-and-white answer only to be teased into a technical discussion that justifies the further introduction of the necessary grey area surrounding issues involved. In all, masterfully done. Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Mar '97, p99.

Muck has written several books including Those Other Religions In Your Neighborhood (Zondervan, 1992), and Alien Gods on American Turf (Victor Books, 1990).