Reclaiming the Center Projects
Reflections on the Scandal of Particularity
Dr. Mark Douglas
Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Columbia Theological Seminary, Atlanta, GA
In my experience, most interreligious dialogues begin in the search for common ground—so much so that the participants of such dialogues begin to make common ground at the cost of their own faith identities rather than admit to their differences. The resulting conversations are—if you’ll pardon the rather indiscreet allusion—rather like the practices of safe sex between casual lovers: full of posturing and comparatively easy, but not very vulnerable or fulfilling, and certainly not likely to be fertile. And in the U.S., where Christianity is the dominant religion, such an approach always carries with it the risk of reinforcing a kind of liberal Christian hegemony. As the dominant cultural group, Christians risk less and assume more about how they can walk on common ground—which is, I think, rather the opposite of how Christians have been called to act in the New Testament.
To begin such conversations by exploring the scandal(s) of particularity, though, is to allow each participant to enter interreligious conversations as full persons (or at least as full as any of us can figure out how to be): partly believing and partly doubting; partly in consonance with the historic faith and partly dissonant to it; partly as a representative for others and partly as an individual, but in all cases as people who think that their religious identity is at least as deep as any other part of their identity. And in the process of such conversations, we do more than discover what we share. We discover who the other is as someone who really is other than us—someone who is the neighbor we’ve been commanded to love rather than a reflection of ourselves that, Narcissus-like, we’ve chosen to adore. And we discover that we may know less of ourselves than we thought because we’re pushed to answer questions about ourselves that we’ve never thought of asking. Such a project is exciting, scary, hopeful, and, as the project’s name suggests, scandalous. Or, at least, so my time in this group has been for me.
© 2009 Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies
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