Pluralism, Interfaith Dialogue and Religious Humanism

It’s been a good ten years since I looked at Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s book For the Sake of Heaven and Earth. I was a board member of InterAct Cleveland and co-chair of its Interreligious Affairs Committee. We convened religious leaders once a month to read and discuss books that were relevant to interfaith discussion. Greenberg’s was one of those books

The effort at rapprochement between Jews and Christians, though facing frequent bumps in the road, is still very much alive. A course I taught at Beth El Congregation in Bethesda, MD titled New Testament for Jews sparked considerable interest and the request for more. Preparing to teach a fall course on Jewish-Christian Dialogue (see my “Public Lectures and Classes” page), I’ve begun re-reading the book, and rediscovering what was so compelling in the first read.

Ironically, Greenberg provides the theological underpinning of what I’m calling Religious Humanism, though I didn’t realize it when I first read the book. He begins by distinguishing religious relativism—the notion that there is no religious truth—to what he calls religious pluralism, which he defines much the same way that I’m defining religious humanism. Greenberg understands that while Truth exists, we all have a limited perspective on Truth, and so we partner through dialogue and interfaith encounter, allowing all involved in this effort to broaden their perspective and capture a greater share of Truth.

But Greenberg goes beyond simply lauding interfaith partnership. He traces an evolution of the idea of covenant that, from a Jewish perspective, leads us to a more humanistic understanding of the concept of covenant, which is, after all, a notion of a human-divine partnership. Essential to what Greenberg projects as a post-modern iteration of covenant—at least as I understand him—is a movement away from an authoritarian notion of covenant as commandment to one of voluntary human responsibility in projecting a life-affirming redemptive divine presence into the world.

Greenberg points out that with the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism rejected the prophetic understanding of revelation—a revelation that is handed down from on high through a specially designated divine spokesman. In its place, classical Judaism positioned the Rabbi, the Torah scholar, the human seeker who, together with his colleagues, was authorized to determine the divine will through dialogue and consensus.

The next stage, the post-modern phase of the evolution of covenant, is the autonomy of each human being to work through dialogue and discussion, partnership and participation to fulfill the vision of a redeemed, perfected world. In this new iteration, everyone who seeks to redeem the world from suffering, death, destruction, injustice and oppression is a covenant partner. I’ll be using thoughts that emerge from Greenberg’s book, as well as a book by Rev. M. Thomas Thangaraj titled The Common Task: A Theology of Christian Mission in my classes at Beth El. Thangaraj looks at pluralism and interfaith partnership as part of a new understanding of Christian mission.