The Gift of Responsibility

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The Gift of Responsibility

• The Promise of Dialogue Among Christians, Jews,
  and Muslims
• By
• Lewis S. Mudge

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• When you find yourself stuck, try enlarging your
  categories.
• W.D. Davies
• To suggest enlarging categories to take in new
  horizons may in fact be an unwelcome suggestion
  to many battlers who draw energy from their
  struggles and do not want to see them end too
  soon.

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• We spiritual pilgrims of the early twenty-first
  century
• live with a growing awareness of the ambiguous
  portents of religious pluralism
• have found various forms of both internaland
  intercommunal violence
• have an apparent paradox the rising levelsof
  angry confrontation along with deepeningdialogica
  l relationships.

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Framing a Discussable Hypothesis

• The purpose of this book is to offer a hypothesis
  capable of provoking constructive argument about
  what the real story is and what it means.
• In a world filled with religious strife, members
  of the Abrahamic faiths and not only they
  have been building dialogical and practical
  relationships . . . that involve specific mutual
  responsibilities and commitments.
• I will try to show that such commitments arise
  because those involved find themselves gifted and
  motivated by a sense of shared responsibility to
  one another and to the world.

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A model for a conscious agenda

• Those actively involved need conceptual
  resources, however tentative, for discerning and
  naming the meaning of all this interfaith
  activity.
• Modernity has helped to bring Western religious
  consciousness to a point at which serious
  interaction between faith traditions is
  conceivable.
• Such a perspective now includes the use of
  human-science resources.
• The core of the responsibility theory in this
  book derives from the story of Abraham, the model
  of responsibility before God.
• We are summoned to do those things that make us
  free to be instrucments of the promise of
  blessing extended to all human beings.
• In the Abrahamic scriptures, this blessing is
  both an act of giving and a gift that conveys the
  responsibility to be what we will be, in
  ourselves and for others.

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Three faiths

• In this vision, extended and developed, lies the
  promise the possibility that the three Abrahamic
  faiths can come to comparable, compatible
  (although far from identical) interpretations of
  the gifts of worldly responsibility for sharing
  blessing that they have received, while
  maintaining their own traditional understandings
  of the divine authority that has given them such
  a gift.

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Part I Abrahamic Communities and the Traumas of
Modernity

• Imperial ambitions and religious violence the
  seeming inability to live in peace with one
  another plus the proclivity of corporations and
  nations to irresponsible imperial behavior
• Terrorism against Western interests by radical
  Islamists is rooted in economic injustice, and
  the sense of humiliation that goes with it,
  exacerbated by religious grievances.
• Intra-Islamic violence has been of late even more
  lethal.

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The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians

• A point where internal complex Eastern and
  Western problematics meet.
• The Jewish, Christian, and the Islamic traditions
  are being exploited and distorted.
• Hopeful signs now exist that a positive agenda
  might be feasible lies in the multitude of
  interreligious intergroup studies and
  initiatives now in progress with significant
  achievements to their credit

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Learning about complexity

• The scriptural approach advocated here runs the
  danger of forgetting the complex history of
  textual interpretation in each faith.
• Each tradition has looked at its foundational
  writings through multiple lenses. Some more
  useful for our project than others.
• Faith communities respond to these contacts and
  activities with internal struggles about how they
  are to be understood in relation to long-held
  confessional traditions and theological
  positions.

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An agenda for Rooted Cosmopolitans

• While the inter-Abrahamic scene is complex, there
  are comparable issues and analogous debates
  across a wide variety of circumstances.
• In all three faiths, there are both theological
  resources to be developed and persons around to
  build a shared way forward.
• The agenda we need will have to do not with
  abstractly comparing doctrinal formulations but
  with holding such convictions as grounds for
  shared witness in the world.

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Part II Dimensions of Inter-Abrahamic Discourse

• Reading Scriptures together obedience and
  responsibility in the Abrahamic narratives-- To
  bring forth descendants through whom the families
  of the earth will find a blessing (Gen 121-3)
• Communities of covenantal virtue--characteristics
  of the institutional arrangements graduate
  schools, seminaries, congregations, movements,
  organized projects
• Political philosophy for an Abrahamic public
  presence--exploring the new action-worlds our
  texts, read today, open for us.

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All the families of the earth

• Civil society and social contracts in
  Israel-Palestine--cross-border presence of
  inter-Abrahamic covenantal communities can
  provide helpful consequences
• Toward a covenantal humanism--an idea standing
  alone without communal or narrative support would
  not stand for long--personhood becomes a matter
  of relationships within the family and the
  community that unfold as the history of the
  community unfolds