The Bible and Other Faiths

Ida Glaser

Description

In today's world, when Christians think about other religions, numerous questions and issues arise - and their convictions about Christ and about other religions can have a significant influence on their understanding of how God relates to people, and what their own conduct towards them should be.
From her wealth of inter-cultural and inter-faith experience, Ida Glaser believes that the most urgent questions for Christians focus on their own responsibilities and other peoples' welfare. Responding to Micah 6:8 - 'And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God' - Dr Glaser explores biblical perspectives on other faiths and their adherents, with clarity, sensitivity and challenging insights for all Christians.

Informations

• Publié par: Langham Creative Projects
• Date de parution: 14 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781907713279
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Bible and Other Faiths
What Does the Lord Require of Us?
Ida Glaser
Series Editor: David Smith Consulting Editor: Joe Kapolyo

Contents
Acknowledgments
Part 1—Setting the Scene
1: People and Places
2 : The Academic Scene
3 : Reading the Bible
Part 2—Reading the Old Testament
4 : Peoples Surrounding Israel, and Their Gods
5 : Beginnings : Genesis
6 : Development : The Calling of a People
7 : God’s Nation among the Nations
8 : God, Gods and Nations
Part 3—Reading the New Testament
9 : Setting the Scene: The World Behind the Text
10 : A New People
11 : Facing Samaritan Religion
12 : Facing the Gentile Religions
13 : The Questions We Want to Ask
Part 4—Seeing Ourselves
14 : The Bible as a Mirror
15 : What Does the Lord Require of Us?
Endnotes
Copyright



Acknowledgments
T he book has been a team effort. It has my name on the cover, but it would not have been written without many other people and without insights from many parts of the world.
Dan Beeby (UK and Taiwan), Margaret Chen (Malaysia), Derek D’Souza (India and UK), Kevin Ellis (UK), Falak Sher Falak (Pakistan), Najeeb Awaz (Syria), John Moxon (UK), Philip Seddon (UK) and Dick Seed (South Africa and Germany) formed the group that helped with the initial research. This was a course that I organized, ‘Reading the Bible in its own Interfaith Context’, in the Centre for Mission Education and Training at Selly Oak, Birmingham, UK, during the summer term, 2000. Most of the group contributed papers, and all joined the discussion.
I taught much of the material in this book to the students of the ‘Missionary Encounter with the World’s Religions’ MA class at the Theological College of Northern Nigeria, and some to the students of St Francis of Assisi College, Wusasa. They greatly helped me by their responses. Some of this book was first written in Nigeria, and so owes much to their influence.
The final shaping of the book, using the ‘dangerous triangle’ of people, land and power (see ch. 7), is in response to visits to Kenya and India in the summer of 2003. In Kenya I was part of a study group on ‘Conflict, Suffering and Mission’ chaired by Bishop Ben Kwashi of Jos, Nigeria, at the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion’s International Conference, ‘Anglican Life in Mission’. In India I was lecturing at Union Biblical Seminary, Pune, and particularly benefited from interactions with Drs P. S. Jacob and Jacob Thomas, and from T. Mangthianlal’s sharing of his journey towards a biblical understanding of the plight of his Zo people, whose territory is divided between India, Bangladesh and Myanmar.
I am indebted to Dan Beeby and Chris Wright for the hermeneutical model underlying the book’s structure (see ch. 3). Their approaches to the Old Testament have greatly influenced my thinking. Kevin Ellis has helped with the New Testament material. He has cast his scholarly eye over it and offered many suggestions. Pradip Sudra was a great help in discussing the concept and shape of the book and read and commented on the Old Testament chapters. David Smith has been an encouraging and long-suffering editor, and Barbara Colebrook-Peace’s careful reading of the whole manuscript has been invaluable.
During the writing, I have been involved in setting up the Edinburgh Centre for Muslim–Christian Studies, and have been a postdoctoral fellow at the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Edinburgh. This has given me access to valuable library resources, as well as being a stimulating context in which to develop ideas.
Finally, I wish to thank the Anglican mission agency Crosslinks, who have been my employers throughout, and the Sir Halley Stewart Trust, who made a considerable grant towards my employment costs in the year 2003–4.
Ida Glaser
Edinburgh, September 2004



Part 1—Setting the Scene



1: People and Places
E very sentence of this book is written in acute awareness of blood and tears being shed as human beings, made in the image of God, show the effects of their ‘fall’ in the contexts of their religions. It is also written in the belief that Jesus Christ is God’s gift to his fallen world.
As I started writing, people were looking for survivors under the rubble of the New York World Trade Center that was destroyed on 11 September 2001. People in Jos, Nigeria, were rebuilding their lives after mosques and churches were burnt down and many Christians and Muslims were killed and injured. The radio was carrying programmes about clashes between nationalistic Hindus and people of other faiths in India. Buddhists and Hindus continued the civil war in Sri Lanka, and Catholics and Protestants seemed unable to settle their political differences in Northern Ireland. No wonder the British atheist scientist Richard Dawkins sees religion as destructive! He calls his article about the attack on the World Trade Center ‘Religion’s misguided missiles’ and comments, ‘To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns.’ 1
What should Christians think about all this? And what should they do? What difference can Jesus Christ make to these results of the ‘fall’? I was asked to write a book on theology: a biblical theology of Christianity and other religions. I thought of all the questions Christian students ask about religions: Is Christ the only way? Is there any truth in religions? Where does it come from? Can people of other religions get to heaven? Are they worshipping God or the devil? Should we try to convert them? How can we convert them? Now, I am not sure that these are the right questions.
As I have studied the Bible, lived among people of different religions and talked with many Christians, I have realized that there are more urgent questions. How can we understand religions and the way they affect human beings? What has God done for people of different religions? What is he doing among them?
And what does he require of us? How should we respond to their gods? How do the great commandments (Matt. 22:34–40) and the great commission (Matt. 28:16–20) relate to people of other religions? And to places of interreligious conflict?
Of course, the two sets of questions are related. What we believe about Christ and about the religions will change our ideas of how God relates to people and of what we should do. The difference is that the second set of questions focuses on other people’s welfare and our own responsibility. The first set is more about how we should judge other people. It is the second set that I find most urgent for actual relationships with people.
In August 2001 I led a seminar for teachers from theological colleges in Uganda. We were thinking about how and why they taught Islam. The key question, I suggested to them, is, ‘How should we, as Christians live in relation Muslims? What does God want of us?’ We looked at the Sermon on the Mount, at the Great Commandment of Matthew 22:39 and at the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18–20. Then we read Micah 6:8 (my translation):
He has showed you, O human being, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
Then I asked, ‘How are we getting along? Are we living like that in relation to Muslims? What stops us?’
The answers came immediately: ‘Muslims say that Jesus is not the Son of God. They criticize the Bible. They won’t let us preach. They are setting up lots of new mosques. They want to “take over” our town. They are persecuting Christians in Sudan. They won’t eat our food. They are trying to marry our daughters . . .’
I repeated what they had said, and they got the point. Even if all those things were true, is there anything in Muslims that Christians can blame for their own lack of obedience to God? Nothing in Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists, or even other Christians, can stop us from doing what God requires: only what is in us can do that.
In January 2002 I went to Jos, Nigeria. People told me how, during the conflict the previous September, Christian and Muslim youths set up roadblocks and stopped cars. Only if people were from the ‘right’ religion were they allowed through. To find out their religion, Muslims asked them to recite the shahada . 2 Those who failed were killed. Christians asked them to recite John 3:16. Those who failed were killed.
The title for this book comes from the Ugandan experience. The urgency comes from the Nigerian story. As we read the Bible we may not find answers to all our questions about other people. But, if the Bible is God’s word to human beings, we can expect the answer to ‘What does the Lord require of us?’ Perhaps the world will then be able to appreciate that it was in love that God sent his only Son, and find the life instead of death promised in John 3:16.
About me
My own first experience of interfaith relationships was, I suppose, when my Christian mother bore me and my Jewish father held me in his arms and gave me the name of his mother, Ida, who died in Auschwitz. 3 My father, my brothers and I were all baptized together when I was 6 years old, and I committed my life to Jesus Christ at 14. Not much later came my most difficult experience of interfaith relationships: my parents died in a car acci