Paul Knitter Inter-Religious Dialogue and Social Action

Paul Knitter starts his paper by claiming that inter-religious dialogue and social action
need to collaborate in order to achieve their goals. He defines the idea of inter-religious
dialogue, which he describes as a particular instance of the way human beings interact in
order to render history a movement rather than a repetition: they talk with each other, they
challenge each other, they agree and disagree and so they grow in a fuller understanding of
reality, or what is called truth. On the other side, by social action we should understand any
activity by which human beings seek to resolve what obstructs and promote what advances,
human and environmental flourishing. What he suggests is that when religious people want
to engage each other, they need to do so as, or together with, social activists. And social
activists need to be, or collaborate with, religious practitioners if they want to effectively do
the job they hope to do.
The next section of his paper presents the types of dialogue and virtues for dialogue.
Starting from a categorization proposed by the Vatican Council for Interreligious Dialogue,
practitioners of inter-religious dialogue distinguish three different types:
1) The dialogue of theology based on study, the attempt to understand one anothers
beliefs, doctrines, and teachings. This usually calls for reading each others sacred
texts, which also requires learning of one anothers languages. The kind of dialogue
in which we try to get our heads straight our concepts correct, our misunderstanding
adjusted.
2) The dialogue of spirituality seeks to go deeper. One tries to appreciate, maybe
even share, the feelings that religious people have when they practice their rituals and
tell their stories. Participants seek to bring their hearts into sync with each other.
Mystics are the experts at this kind of dialogue.
3) The dialogue of action participants get their hands dirty, but they do so together.
Religious people act together to confront and resolve common problems.
4) He also mentions a fourth type of dialogue, which is less intentional than the others:
the dialogue of life - interaction between people from different religions living in the
same neighbourhood.
After talking about the types of dialogue, he goes on and mentions Catherine Cornille, who
has listed what she believes are the necessary virtues that anyone who wants to dialogue has
to practice. There are five such virtues:
1) Humility dialoguers wont be able to do what they want to do unless they are
humble about what they already know through their own religion. Participants must
admit that no matter how much they have already discovered in their own traditions,
there is always more to know. Cornille calls this doctrinal humility as true as any
religious doctrine or belief may be, it can never be the whole truth, as religions deal
with divine or transcendent truth, and no human mind or system can contain the
fullness of such truth.
2) Commitment participants have to hold firm to, and have to be held firm by, the
truth they do possess through their religious traditions. Dialogue is not just trading
information, but it is truth that matters. My commitment to my own beliefs will

inspire and require me not just to explain, but to witness them to you. In other words,
I want to persuade you to share in the truth that I have experienced.
3) Trust in Interconnectedness despite the depth of their commitments and despite
the difference between religious perspectives, there is something that makes it
possible for religious believers to understand each other and to challenge each other.
If the religions of the world are apples and oranges and cannot be compared, interreligious dialoguers insist that they are all interconnected in their natures as fruit.
4) Empathy trying to understand our dialogue partners not just with the clarity of our
minds but also with the sensitivity of our hearts. It requires a goodly amount of
letting go, of allowing your imagination to lead you into new space. Empathy is the
energy that animates the process of passing over into another traditions symbols,
stories, and practices, and then passing back to see what difference this experience
of the other makes for the understanding of ones own.
5) Hospitality Cornille calls it the sole sufficient condition for dialogue. If we invite
other believers into our own religious home as guests, then we will not be good hosts,
real hosts, unless we are genuinely open to the gifts they bring us. We have to be open
to receiving gifts of truth, even though they might be in tension with our own.
In the next section, The Subjugation of the Particular to the Universal, Knitter brings the
next argument. Particularists remind all theologians of religions or practitioners of dialogue
of something that should be self-evident: everything we see is determined by where we live.
When we appeal to the facts, nothing but the facts, we have to remind ourselves that those
facts never come naked; they are never nothing but, for they are always interpreted by our
cultural attitudes and presuppositions. St. Thomas Aquinas everything that is known is
known according to the mode of the knower. Particularists go on to point out that our social
conditioning is also an ideological or political conditioning. What we see is not only
determined by our own perspective, but also by our inherent desire to preserve and privilege
our own perspective. In affirming the truth that we see, we are seeking to preserve the power
that we have. If the particularists claim that all our efforts to know and understand are
socially and politically conditioned, then the particularists draw a daunting conclusion: all
universal truth claims, or all attempts to announce what is true always and everywhere for
everyone, are inherently dangerous. More pointedly, every universal truth claim is a
camouflaged effort to dominate, even though the dominator is not aware of it and is full of
good will to the other.
In his section on the necessity and priority of socially engaged inter-religious dialogue, he
examines how religious experience seems to call for social engagement. Knitter has two big
questions:
1) Why does inter-religious dialogue need social action? Because all religious people have
to take seriously the critique of Marxists and humanists that religion serves as opium for the
suffering masses. He shares Farid Esacks discomfort that so many of the inter-religious
meetings that he has been invited to turn out to be merely tea parties.
2) Why does social action need inter-religious dialogue? Because the complex problems
that call for our attention and action are global, and the solutions therefore must be global.
The vast majority of peoples who populate this planet happen to be religious. Their lives and
their responses to the world around them are based on and motivated by their religious
worldviews.

In the last subchapter of his paper, Knitter investigates how social action can contribute to
inter-religious dialogue. He suggests suffering and empathy as mutual points of these two
sides and considers suffering as the common ground which eventually might lead to
collaboration. The dialogue of actions has a certain priority over the dialogue of theology or
spirituality. If we cannot be sure there is anything that all the religions have in common
within themselves, we can be sure that they have something in common all around them.
Whatever the various religions may or may not have in common, they all feel the necessity of
offering some kind of response to the sufferings. The way suffering can and does affect
human beings indicates that the needless suffering of others has a universal ability to touch
and affect human beings prior to whatever cultural or religious conditioning they have.
In the fundamental teachings of the religions we can see that all of them seek to bring
some kind of betterment whether they call it salvation or enlightenment or moksha or
harmony to the human condition. Religious people propose ways to transform both
individuals and society. Though, usually, they begin with spiritual practices aimed at the
necessity of personal transformation, they also propose ways of transforming the way social
life is conducted.
It is by joining their prophetic commitments in shared social action to remove suffering
that religious believers from differing traditions can find not just a relevant but a propitious
place to start their dialogue.
A socially engaged inter-religious dialogue that begins by forming a community of solidarity
with those who are suffering brings, by necessity, new voices to the conversation: the voices
of those who suffer, and of those who can speak for suffering creatures and planet. If they are
not in some way or at some point included in the dialogue, then socially engaged dialogue
runs the risk of becoming another instance of foreign aid of experts coming to the rescue
of the helpless poor.
To sum up, he lays out the movements by which a socially engaged inter-religious dialogue
can naturally unfold.
1) Compassion Many religious persons from different traditions can feel and actually
are feeling a natural, spontaneous compassion for those who are suffering
2) Conversion the feeling of compassion will have to take real, practical effect in ones
life. Compassion will call for conversion; otherwise it is not real compassion
3) Collaboration such compassion for the suffering others and conversion to their
plight naturally and necessarily leads to acting for them and with them on their behalf.
This is where the religious participants in dialogue roll up their sleeves and get their
hands dirty, together.
4) Comprehension after they suffer with the suffering (compassion), after they come
together in response to their plight (conversion), and especially after they feel the
solidarity of acting together, religious people will feel enabled, or even compelled, to
understand each other as religious people.
5) Communion