Learned Ignorance Intellectual Humility among Jews, Christians and Muslims

by Heft, James L.; Firestone, Reuven; Safi, Omid

• ISBN13: 9780199769315
• ISBN10: 0199769311
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-08-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Constructive interreligious dialogue is only a recent phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century, most dialogue among believers was carried on as a debate aimed either to disprove the claims of the other, or to convert the other to one's own tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missionaries of different denominations had created such a cacophony amongst themselves in the mission fields that they decided that it would be best if they could begin to overcome their own differences instead of confusing and even scandalizing the people whom they were trying to convert. By the middle of the twentieth century, the horrors of the Holocaust compelled Christians, especially mainline Protestants and Catholics, to enter into a serious dialogue with Jews, one of the consequences of which was the removal of claims by Christians to have replaced Judaism, and revising text books that communicated that message to Christian believers. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many branches of Christianity, not least the Catholic Church, are engaged in a world-wide constructive dialogue with Muslims, made all the more necessary by the terrorist attacks of September 11. In these new conversations, Muslim religious leaders took an important initiative when they sent their document,''A Common Word Between Us,'' to all Christians in the West. It is an extraordinary document, for it makes a theological argument (various Christians in the West, including officials at the Vatican, have claimed that a ''theological conversation'' with Muslims is not possible) based on texts drawn from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an, that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers share the God-given obligation to love God and each other in peace and justice. The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies brought together an international group of sixteen Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim scholars to carry on an important theological exploration of the theme of ''learned ignorance.''

Author Biography

James L. Heft, S. M., is a member of the Society of Mary (Marianists). In 2006, he became the Alton Brooks Professor of Religion and the President of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California. Along with three other leaders in Catholic higher education, he founded in 1996 Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice. He has published and edited twelve books and written over 160 articles and book chapters. Reuven Firestone is Professor of Medieval Judaism and Islam at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and founding co-director of the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement. His published works include Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam, Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Judaism for Muslims, Jews, Christians, Muslims in Dialogue: A Practical Handbook, and Who Are the "Real" Chosen People? Omid Safi is the Chair for the Study of Islam section of the American Academy of Religion. A leading Muslim public intellectual in America, he is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam and Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. ix
Learned Ignorance	p. 1
Learned Ignorance and Interreligious Dialogue
Some Requisites for Interfaith Dialogue	p. 23
Learned Ignorance and Faithful Interpretation of the Qur'an in Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464)	p. 34
"Seeing the Sounds": Intellectual Humility and the Process of Dialogue	p. 53
Finding Common Ground: "Mutual Knowing," Moderation, and the Fostering of Religious Pluralism	p. 67
Must Particularity Be Exclusive?
Humble Infallibility	p. 89
Chosenness and the Exclusivity of Truth	p. 107
The Belief in the Incarnation of God: Source of Religious Humility or Cause of Theological Pride?	p. 129
Supernatural Israel: Obstacles to Theological Humility in Jewish Tradition	p. 149
Walking on Divine Edge: Reading Notions of Arrogance and Humility in the Qur'an	p. 170
Violence, Apologies, and Conflict
After Augustine: Humility and the Search for God in Historical Memory	p. 191
Apology, Regret, and Intellectual Humility: An Interreligious Consideration	p. 210
Islamic Theological Perspectives on Intellectual Humility and the Conditioning of Interfaith Dialogue	p. 225
Religious Pluralism
A Meditation on Intellectual Humility, or on a Fusion of Epistemic Ignorance and Covenantal Certainty	p. 241
Saving Dominus Iesus	p. 257
Between Tradition and Reform: Between Premodern Sufism and the Iranian Reform Movement	p. 278
Epilogue: The Purpose of Interreligious Dialogue	p. 300
Index	p. 313
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