It isn’t easy to distinguish between culture and religion. More or less every religion – including Hinduism, Judaism and Islam – makes its own culture and every culture its own religion. Culture, however, is the presupposition in order to understand religion itself: this is an indubitable self-evidence that changes only in the encounter with other cultures. Because of this, in multi-ethnic societies, the most unquestionable certainties are the most discussed ones. Conviction doesn’t coincide with truth, but with fanaticism.
Christianity could not exist if it didn’t dialogue with everybody. The mystery, hidden and revealed in Christ, is that in the Son, beyond every barrier, God is Father/Mother of all (Ephesians 3:1-12). No fence can divide people. There is no more Jew or Greek (religious difference), slave or free (social difference), man or woman (gender difference). What appears absolute becomes relative: it is put in relation to the other, in order to constitute that unity in diversity which is distinctive of Christianity (Galatians 3:28). In fact, love creates otherness and relation: whoever loves, loves those who are different from the self and defines himself/herself from his/her relation with them.
Coming out of the Jewish culture allowed Christianity to open Abraham’s promise to the world (Acts 15:1ff). The dialogue with the other religions discloses ever new horizons to it. To identify it with the western culture would be tantamount to killing it.
Christianity is not only Book or Word, but it is Word made flesh, the story of God and man, of every man. Even of post-modern man with his multicultural ways. Certainly, to live together with different people demands a unifying principle. And this is only love that doesn’t devour those who are different, either homologating or rejecting them, but respects them, putting them in communication and communion. The alternative is war, an abomination against God because it is against human beings. Christianity is not a “re-ligion” that “binds” and “re-binds” (from Latin: religare, i.e., to bind) people to some laws neither does it coincide with a particular culture. Its only law is the freedom of the children of God who live among themselves as brothers and sisters (James 2:12). The “Body of Jesus,” his story as Son of God and Son of Man, brother to every human being, is the center of our faith, salvation for the whole of Humanity and our own, in particular.
Dialogue frees us from the ghetto mentality that chokes our faith. The latter, although expressed within a given culture, is capable of valuing the others. Each one of them can live out fraternity in their own way. We can be Christians and Jews like in the mother Church of the origins; Christians and Copts, Greeks, Syrians like in the early Church communities; Christians and Roman Catholics, Ambrosian or Malabaric Catholics or something else like us, nowadays. In the same way, tomorrow, we will be Christians and Muslims, Hinduists, Taoists, etc.
The fear of dialogue is lack of faith: it deals with our ideas (= idols) as if they were fetishes and ignores the Son who is the universal brother. “My ideas, my values and the dictates of my faith” are fruits of my culture: to make them absolute doesn’t mean firmness or steadfastness, but uncertainty of faith. “God is not a Catholic”: from each of the others we learn something different about God. It is up to the Christian person first to accept the others, because the Father loves them as children. If we do not make ourselves “all things to all people” like Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 9:22), we are not Christians. If some Jews were able to free Christianity from the Jewish tradition, we nowadays must free it from the Western heritage, starting from making it less Roman so that it may be more Catholic, on a journey towards its target and the target of the world: so that “God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).
The love of truth is a very good thing. But what is truth without love? To bear witness to a God who is Father/Mother of all is certainly better than any stake or crusade in the name of supposed truths. © Popoli – www.popoli.info
