The Dialogue Between Cultures and Religions

Kraemers Contribution in the Light of Later Developments

D.C. Mulder
I

Religion and religions: Kraemers understanding of the biblical message In the preface to Religion and the Christian Faith Kraemer describes his main concern as follows: to investigate into the great human fact, religion, in the light of biblical revelation, particularly in the light of Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life. In the Bible you will not find a theology of religion or religions, let alone a philosophical or scientific treatment of that great human fact, the existence of religion. What we do find is the message of Gods revelation, centred in Jesus Christ. It is God, revealing himself not in ideas or dogmas but in a person. And this person is the crisis of all religion. Jesus Christ is also the criterion by which to judge religion. Here the problem arises as to whether we can speak of Gods general revelation besides this special revelation in Jesus Christ. Kraemer finds general revelation a misleading term (p.341), alien to the Bible. Revelation in the Bible is objective divine action, decisively in the person and work of Jesus Christ the word made flesh (p.345). Nevertheless, there are evidences of Gods revealing activity within the domain of the religions (p.348); there is a self-disclosure of God in the past, the present and the future through nature, history and conscience (p.337). Here Kraemer wants to take some distance from Karl Barth, as he understands him. The Bible knows other modes of revelation but they all find their source, their meaning and their criterion in Jesus Christ. We might ask whether there is a difference between Kraemers ideas in Religion and the Christian Faith and his earlier book The Christian Message. Kraemer writes in the later book: As a whole I continue to hold strongly to the main theses of The Christian
0 Dr Mulder, formerly a professor at the Free University in Amsterdam, is currently moderator of the Netherlands Council of Churches. Religion and the Chrisfian Faith, London, Luttenvorth Press, 1958. * The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, London, Edinburgh House Press, 1938.

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Message in u non-Christian World (p.232). But he wants to set right some deficiences in the earlier book. He acknowledges that he had to some extent neglected the awareness of God which is to be found in non-Christian religions. He wants to speak in a more dialectical way about the world of religion and religions. One may wonder, however, whether Kraemer succeeds in doing so. He speaks about a yes and a no in religions, the positive and the negative, as they appear in the light of revelation (p.334). But he also contends that in the perspective of biblical revelation all religions are beside the mark, religiofalsu (p.340). In all religions we discover striking religious and moral sincerity but in regard to the issue of ultimate truth, this has no significance whatever. In this connection it is interesting to give some attention to Kraemers view of the relation between theology and the science of religion. Kraemer has wrestled during his whole life with this relation. On the one hand he is full of admiration for the achievements of the science of religion. He has learned a lot from it and has an astonishingly wide knowledge about the world of religions. But on the other hand he wants to remain a disciple, a captive of Jesus Christ, also in the interpretation and evaluation of non-Christian religions (p. 144). Christ is the measure of true religion. The religious history of the human race can only be rightly understood in him. This may sound intolerant, but according to Kraemer it is not. He even contends that in principle Christianity is the only tolerant religion, because it is based on Gods forbearance and his seeking love. Moreover, every philosophy or view of life must be in the last resort intolerant in the sense of being exclusive.

Ideas about syncretism

For Kraemer syncretism is a fundamental problem in the encounter of Christianity and other religions, in mission and missiology. Well known is the distinction he made between the so-called monistic, naturalistic religions of self-realization on the one hand and the prophetic religions, the religions of revelation, on the other hand. Syncretism belongs to the first category, whereas the prophetic religion of biblical realism does not show this syncretistic, relativist trend. Such was Kraemers standpoint before the second world war. We find it in The Christian Message and in his inaugural address of 1937. In Religion and the Christian Faith he again deals with the problem. Kraemer distinguishes between absorption and syncretism. Great world religions like Christianity and Islam have absorbed many extraneous elements. That is the inevitable by-product of culture-contacts. But Christianity and Islam are by nature exclusive, immune to the syncretistic spirit. It is clear that syncretism with Kraemer has a pejorative connotation. It means taking up of elements which are contrary to the authentic soul of the absorbing religion. That is especially a problem for the churches in Asia. Kraemer fully realizes that the Christian faith is not identical with Western Christianity. But he is worried that Christians in Asia (he does not mention Africa) will not be immune to the subtly syncretistic temptation, because they live in the midst of the monistic religions of self-realization. The only way to avoid that temptation is deeper delving into the Bible. So it is not a matter of Western Christianity against Asian Christianity, but of faith in biblical realism, to use that term again, which should strike roots in Asia through absorption, and should itself guard against the danger of syncretism. 14

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That subject is amply dealt with in the book World Cultures and World Religions. Here he deals with the relations of Eastern cultures and religions with the West in the past, and then goes very thoroughly into the response of the East to the Western invasions, the response of the Muslim world, Hindu India, the Buddhist world and China and Japan. He also devotes a chapter to the Western response to Eastern cultures and religions. Kraemer is fully aware of the developments after the second world war, the coming of independence to colonized nations, the search for identity, the resurgence of the religions. It is remarkable that in the late fifties he observes already that one finds conservative trends in the Eastern religions, especially in Islam, which refuse to come to terms with the modern world. From that side unexpected explosions and developments are always possible, said Kraemer, and we all know how right he was.

Intercultural and inter-religious encounter Let me confine myself to the issue of dialogue. In the last part of the last book Kraemer wrote, he gave special attention to the coming dialogue. He makes first some very pertinent observations about what he calls the coming world-civilization. In the West he notices a strong anti-religious and especially antiChristianity feeling, and a tendency to fill up the religious vacuum with new religious ideas, mainly of the Eastern type. In the East he finds the resurgence of religions, of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Within Christianity there is a strong self-criticism and a deep awareness and merciless analysis of its own religious and cultural crisis,j whereas in the East one finds an apologetic self-assertion. But fundamentally all religions are in a period of lasting crisis, they all face secularization and thus the necessity to reinterpret their unalterable, fundamental positions (pp.348-35 1). This makes inter-religious dialogue all the more necessary. In this dialogue two aims may be distinguished: a pragmatic and a fundamental one. The pragmatic aim is to remove mutual misunderstandings and to serve common human tasks. The fundamental aim is the open exchange of witness, experience, cross-questioning and listening (p.356). Christians, according to Kraemer, cannot enter this coming dialogue except with the conviction of the exclusivist claims of the biblical message. This exclusiveness has nothing to do with religious arrogance, intolerance or dogmatic assertions (p.365). It has to be acknowledged that philosophically speaking there is a weakness in the Christian position: it is founded on historical revelation. Asian religions, on the contrary, are religious philosophies. They teach the sublimity of unqualified Being with the mystic or sage triumphant through his or her victory in self-awakening. Over against this image arises the Christian image of the humility of God, incarnate in the humble suffering servant, Jesus Christ. In this context it is interesting to quote an observation of Kraemer about Islam:5
The time of Christian missions in the Muslim World, as an organized determined effort for Muslims and as inherited from the nineteenth century, is, as far as I can see, past in the post-colonial era. A radical rethinking and reshaping is therefore imperiously demanded, if we discern the signs of the time.
World Cultures and World Religions: the Coming Dialogue, London, Luttenvorth, 1960. Ibid. , p.341. 51slamic Culture and Missionarj Adequacy, in Muslim World, Vol. L, No. 4, October 1960, p.250.

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When I met Kraemer for the last time in 1964, during a furlough from Indonesia, he told me that he planned to write three more books, one on Islam, one on Hinduism, one on Buddhism. They would start with a phenomenological description of these religions and end with a dialogue which would bring out the central points at issue between Christianity and the religion dealt with. Kraemer hints at this plan in his last book. He writes in a note: the writer hopes, if strength and life are granted to him, to write these books and offer them as a personal attempt. Time was not given to him to realize this plan. But we have sufficient material, offered by Kraemer, to put the question how he, twenty-five years later, can reappraise his own ideas. In the second part of my paper I plan to make a tentative effort to answer that question.

A changed scene
Let us see what has changed in the field of the encounter of religions and cultures since Hendrik Kraemer wrote his last two books. In the first place the role of Africa has become much more important since the early 1960s. Kraemer hardly gave attention to Africa or to the so-called traditional cultures in general. In the second place there has been a strong renaissance of world religions and religious fundamentalisms all over the world. Kraemer had some premonitions about fundamentalism, as we saw, but he could not know in his time that his premonitions would come true to such an extent. In the late 50s and early 60s - and this is my third point - there was not yet the awareness of the all-embracing crisis into which humankind has run in the second part of our century. The threats of lethal forces have become immense. Nuclear armament, poverty and hunger, the pollution of the environment - all these raise the question of the very survival of humankind. These shadows are hovering over all world cultures and world religions and only a common effort of the whole of humankind might be able to forestall disaster. In the last two decades we also saw the rise of new theological developments like the theology of liberation and feminist theology. They force us to look in a new way at the message of the Bible and to rethink what biblical realism might mean. And then there is the important fact that dialogue is not any more the corning dialogue, but it is now the dialogue that has come. Take for example the declaration of the Second Vatican Council on the attitude of the church to non-Christian religions and the subsequent establishment of the Secretariat for non-Christians, and also the establishment of the Sub-unit on Dialogue of the WCC in 1971. In many cases interreligious dialogue has become part of the programme of the churches. Many dialogical activities have been started and continue to be carried out not only on the initiative of churches or Christians but also of other religions. The experiences acquired in these activities of dialogue have forced churches, theologians and especially missiologists to reconsider many notions of belief and theology. One thing would appear not to have changed considerably or certainly not totally and that is the influence of Kraemers ideas which have dominated the field of mission and missiology during his life-time, say ever since Tambaram 1938, although they have never gone uncontested.

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Does Kraemer continue to be relevant?

I come now to the final and crucial part of my paper, the question as to whether and to what extent we can still use Kraemers ideas about the encounter of world cultures and world religions. I limit myself to world religions; I have the impression that Kraemer himself was also more interested in world religions than in world cultures as such. The difficulty I face in dealing with this question is that there is no one answer that is generally accepted. I give my own tentative opinion and I do so not as a missiologist, which I cannot claim to be, but on the one hand as a historian of religion and on the other hand as one who has been involved in dialogue, especially the dialogue programme of the WCC. I arrange my observations according to three subjects: (1) biblical realism and the non-Christian religions; (2) syncretism; and (3) the terms and aims of dialogue. 1. As for the first topic, biblical realism and the non-Christian religions, my first point of reservation is about the absolute difference Kraemer sees between biblical realism on the one hand and the religions of the world on the other. You immediately run into difficulty with Christianity. Is Christianity just another world religion, along with all world religions under the same judgment of biblical realism? But what is biblical realism then? Is it not always biblical realism according to the perceptions of certain Christian denominations, theologies or thinkers and hence a part of Christianity? Is not always the biblical message reaching us through the eyes, ears and mouths of adherents of the Christian religion? And Christianity for sure is a religion among religions. It has its uniqueness, of course, but so have the other religions. One finds all kinds of analogical phenomena and ideas in Christianity and, for that matter, in the Bible itself as elsewhere and I see every reason to consider Christianity, including its holy book, as belonging to the family of religions. The division of religions into prophetic monotheistic religions on the one hand and monistic religions of self-realization on the other is also questionable. We find prophets in the Eastern religions, and the idea of divine grace is not absent in Hinduism or Buddhism. Kraemer points out that these elements like prophecy and divine grace cannot be seen apart from the whole framework in which they occur. But we can also put it the other way around: in spite of the differing frameworks it is remarkable that you run into analogical conceptions and perceptions. Here the theological idea of general revelation needs to be considered. Unlike Barth, Kraemer accepts general revelation, though with some hesitation about the appropriateness of the term; but although he claims to look in a dialectical way at the reality of religions, in fact he has a negative view of them, not only of the monistic religions but also of Islam. I think that we cannot follow Kraemer here. A different theology of religion and religions has to be developed and is in full process of being developed. To make a very long and complicated story short, I suggest that we look at the religions of the world in a really dialectical way. God has not left himself without witness amongst the nations of the world (Acts 14:17), God has had and continues to have dealings with all humankind. That is why people everywhere have sought God and, it might be, touched and found God (Acts 17:27). We should, however, be aware of the fact that religions, including Christianity, have not always been ways to salvation, to harmony, to Heil. There is a dark side to religions. A tremendous lot of harm, of Unheil, has been done in the name of religion. That is why we should look 17

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at religions in a dialectical way, trying to discern the good and the bad in our own religion in the first place and eventually in the religions of people of other faiths. 2. I must confess that I have my doubts about Kraemers distinction between absorption and syncretism and about his view that syncretism belongs to the monistic religions of the East, while in the case of Christianity we should speak of absorption. It would appear to be more precise to speak about the phenomenon of interpenetration and use that term (at least within the field of the history of religions) in a neutral sense. Wherever religions meet or wherever a religion born in one culture spreads to another culture, you will find this phenomenon of interpenetration. Most religions have been able to absorb elements from other religions. That was already true about the religion of Israel in the time of the Old Testament; it was equally true about Christianity in the early centuries of its history and about Western Christianity. So there is no special reason for Western Christians to warn Asian or African Christians against the dangers of syncretism. As Christians in East and West, in North and South, we all face the issue of interpenetration and we all have to ask ourselves where interpenetration is acceptable and where it endangers the core of the Christian message. Here Christians from the South have equal reason and right to be critical of developments in Northern Christianity. To put it in a positive way: it is one of the great blessings of the genesis of worldwide Christianity that now we can help each other to look through our regional idiosyncrasies, to probe again for the core of the biblical message - for biblical realism if you want - and at the same time to relate that message to the context of our time, globally and locally. 3. I come to my last point: the terms and aims of inter-religious dialogue. Let me start by stressing that Kraemer had a very open mind. When dialogue primarily can be described as a mood, an attitude, then we can do no better than emulate Kraemers attitude towards people of other faiths and other cultures. Kraemers formulation of the two aims of dialogue is helpful. The practical aim is, as we saw, to remove mutual misunderstandings and to carry out common human responsibilities. It is quite clear that these have become more urgent than ever. The mutual misunderstandings are still many, and sometimes even growing. Just think of the misunderstandings among Christians about Islam and the tendency to equate Islam with a special, fundamentalist brand of it, or on the other side the tendency to equate Christianity with Western Christianity or even with Western imperialism. Our common human responsibilities have become more pressing than ever in view of the lethal threats I mentioned before. The WCC has launched a conciliar process on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation. We should be aware of the fact that these are issues common to all humankind and that Christians must pursue them with others. Here the importance of dialogue with people of other faiths and other convictions is absolutely clear. As for the fundamental dialogue, Kraemer is right in observing that Christians should enter it with their conviction regarding the importance of the biblical message. Dialogue is a meeting of commitments, to use the phrase coined by Stanley Samartha, and a relativist attitude towards ones own religious tradition and conviction is not conducive to genuine inter-religious dialogue. I hesitate, however, to speak about the exclusivist claims of the biblical message as Kraemer did. Exclusivist claims give the impression that there is no truth whatever in the non-Christian religions and no redemption or salvation outside the Christian faith. If we take the stand that in the

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religions of the world we find a response to Gods revelatory acts, we cannot close our mind to the possibility of finding true experiences of God outside the circle of the biblical message or of Judaism and Christianity. We then also have to allow for the possibility of the salvific activity of Gods Spirit outside the circle of Christianity and the Christian faith. If that is true, then dialogue means also an openness for the work of the Spirit in the life of our partners-in-dialogue. Salvation in the broad sense of Heil, of harmony, of wholeness, comes ultimately from God, and in Jesus Christ we recognize God as Saviour, as Healer, as bringer of salvation. That is our Christian conviction and in dialogue with people of other faiths we need not be ashamed of telling the story of Jesus, the more so when we are challenged to give account of our faith. But this should not prevent us from being open to the witness of our partners in dialogue. It also leads us to try to discern between good and bad in all religions, including our own. The criterion of this discernment could be formulated as openness for God and for our neighbours. Where we find that openness, we may assume that Gods Spirit is at work.

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