Dabru Emet as a Model for ‘Reflective Believing’ Across Traditions
by Robert Cathey
Some read documents that emerge from interreligious dialogue as if they are statements of faith that seek to homogenize traditional differences between communities. Such a reading assumes dialogue partners aim to revise traditional beliefs in order to find a ‘lowest common denominator’ to right relations between religions. The ensuing objection is that dialogue on these terms erases the very beliefs and practices that enrich commitment to particular religious ways of life.
In a critical response to Dabru Emet, Jon Levenson characterized this approach as resulting in a form of “monologue”:
In this way, conflicting truths can all be held to be valid only for different communities so that everybody is right, no mutual critique is possible, and good relations will obtain—at the expense, of course, of the theological core of each community (2).
Edward Foley proposed an approach to pluralistic theological education called “reflective believing.” This approach provides alternative ways to think about the aims and documents of dialogue. In so doing, it also provides a partial response to Levenson’s critique. In contrast to theological reflection (which is most often theistic at its core), reflective believing is a set of language games open to participants from multiple traditions (including non-theistic forms of Judaism and Christianity). Its basis for dialogue is common experiences, not a particular set of theistic claims. Reflective believing:
privileges no particular point of departure or method;
“honors difference rather than questioning it;”
requires virtues of “awe” before others;
is humble before what defies explanation
is courageous when other beliefs challenge one’s own;
feels “holy envy” as we encounter beauty in others;
is attuned to “body language,” “silence,” ritual, and narration;
incorporates both cognitive and affective ways of knowing;
takes “moral sensitivity,” seeking basic goodness in each other; and
seeks to become a “habitus” (Foley 92-94).
While predating Foley’s articulation of this approach, when read as a product of reflective believing Dabru Emet calls us into new ways of being in the presence of each other. When we communicate our traditions to others in light of reflective believing, we should acknowledge how others believe differently, not perceiving this as a threat but as an intensification of the dimension of mystery in all deep commitments.
And Dabru Emet has implications for how Christians teach our beliefs and practices in our own communities. Theological education should be conducted in ways that already acknowledge the presence of religious others in the history of the formation of our own traditions, and as our neighbors in plural societies. For example, Christian students should learn that the Scriptures of our own tradition originated in a pluralistic Jewish context before they were read as the Christian Bible. They should also learn how Jews read the Hebrew Bible differently from how it has been appropriated by Christians over time.
The inclusiveness of Foley’s approach raises other issues. Many who engage in Christian–Jewish dialogue believe in the reality of God as Creator and Redeemer of all things. Reflective believing from their perspective leaves out a crucial dimension in the dialogue: normative beliefs about the reality and activity of God within our lives, our relations, and human and cosmic history.
Reflective believing seeks not only theistic believers but the widest possible audience for interreligious and intercultural learning. As a theory rooted in pedagogy, it recognizes that beliefs about divinity change over time, especially in the context of higher and theological education. Even today’s seminaries include students who hold doubts about some of the basic beliefs of their own tradition.
Rather than excluding doubt as a stage in faith development, reflective believing welcomes participants at whatever point they enter the dialogue. In fact, some of the richest theological reflection has emerged out of the doubtful questions of believers in past centuries who pioneered new methods and vocabularies for reading Scripture and making faith affirmations.
For example, when Christians learn the history of how members of our tradition misrepresented Judaism and persecuted and murdered Jews, they may come to doubt the truthfulness of our own inherited theology. But this suspension of belief in the integrity of specific traditional beliefs can also become the occasion for reflective believing. We can learn how to believe reflectively in our own tradition in the presence of religious others without fear. Acknowledging differences need not destroy one’s own particularity and is essential for witnessing to one’s own convictions in today’s interreligious world. Coming to terms with past and present religious persecution can deepen ethical commitment to love of neighbor and repentance.
Reflective believing opens the door to students becoming artisans engaged in new forms of confessing their faith in nonviolent ways that honor how certain Jewish practices and convictions are integral to Christianity. The very identity of Christianity emerged in the late Roman Empire out of the matrix of both certain shared beliefs and the conflict of differences between Jews and Christians. Christian identity would not be the same without the Jewish other, both in truthful representation that honors difference and misrepresentation that rationalized persecution.
A model for Christians in teaching reflective believing is A Sacred Obligation, a statement by the Christian Scholars Group on Christian–Jewish Relations that responds to Dabru Emet. Its sixth thesis models reflective believing: “Affirming God’s enduring covenant with the Jewish people has consequences for Christian understandings of salvation.” Explication of this thesis includes the following:
With their recent realization that God’s covenant with the Jewish people is eternal, Christians can now recognize in the Jewish tradition the redemptive power of God at work. If Jews, who do not share our faith in Christ, are in a saving covenant with God, then Christians need new ways of understanding the universal significance of Christ (Boys, Seeing Judaism Anew, xvi).
For some, interreligious relations should only be conducted from behind high walls of orthodoxy in ways that risk minor revisions to inherited beliefs and practices that are taken to be essential. For others, the modern recognition of plurality within our traditions (Which ‘orthodoxy’? Whose ‘orthodoxy’?) opens doors to reflective believing that risks new paradigms of faith and practice as we reexamine essentials in the presence of religious neighbors.
Robert Cathey, Ph.D., was Professor of Theology at McCormick Seminary (1998-2020). He is ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and was an active member of the Christian Scholars Group on Christian-Jewish Relations (2008-2019).