The Gift of Responsibility

1. The Gift of Responsibility The Promise of Dialogue Among Christians, Jews, and Muslims By Lewis S. Mudge

2. “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.

3. 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 deepeningdialogical relationships.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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 12:1-3) • 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.

12. 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