Throughout the Bible God calls the believer to love God and neighbor. Jesus offers a definition of neighbor that is radically inclusive. Indeed, it is through the instruction to love ones enemies (Luke 6.32-36) and most profoundly through the teaching of the Great Commandment and the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10.25-38), that Jesus challenges the members of his faith tradition to love neighbor without condition. What is more, Jesus’ teaching of the Parable of the Good Samaritan offers many valuable contextual parallels that speak to the current Christian-Muslim state of affairs. Where those members of the Christian community who have responded with hostility to the presence of the Muslim community once believed this to be the proper response, they will recognize themselves in the lawyers questioning of Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?”[1]
With regard for Christian-Muslim relations in Middle Tennessee, Jesus teaches the Christian believer that the Muslim is one’s neighbor just as much as one’s fellow Christian. And yet, opposition to Mosque building projects and, in most cases, the Islamic Tradition itself has come largely from members of the Christian Tradition. However, it must be noted that those who have responded with opposition represent only a small (however loud) percentage of the Middle Tennessee’s Christian population. While those who oppose the Islamic Community’s right to freely construct places of worship appear quite certain that theirs’ is the proper Christian response to the presence of Muslims in Middle Tennessee, the majority of the Christian Community, though positive that open hostility is not the answer, are admittedly less clear just what is appropriate. Indeed, one Christian that I spoke with concerning this issue insisted, “I don’t know enough about Islam to know if it is a peaceful religion or not, but I know enough about Christianity to know that it should be—if it’s not peaceful and loving then it isn’t Christianity!”
In such cases there is an increasing need for Christians to engage in interfaith dialogue with their Muslim neighbors. As citizens of one of the most religiously observant and at once most diverse societies in the world, James L. Fredericks is right to insist that American “Christians have a responsibility to promote new forms of social and religious solidarity that reach beyond the ‘old diversity’ of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews.”[2] Likewise, in a speech delivered to the Turkish Embassy, President Barack Obama spoke for many in our nation who, like Fredericks, view religious diversity, not as something to be met with hostility, but as a positive development that offers us a powerful new incentive and opportunity to work towards a truer and more robust expression of religious solidarity. Opposing the notion that the United States operates solely as a Christian nation, the President declared, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation," but rather, "We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."[3]
With the nation’s ever increasing religious diversity and the need to engage in meaningful interreligious dialogue as our context, the reality of a thriving plurality is a call for Christian theology to acquire and implement a multi-religious competence; for, as Alan Race is right to point out, “the very fact of religious plurality surely cries out for interpretation.”[4] The growing reality of religious diversity is perhaps the most important issue facing the Christian Church today. In the face of global consciousness, we as Christians must seek out a faithful response to the growing number of religious expressions and in particular the corresponding rise of Islam: a religion that has traditionally been characterized by Christianity as a competing missionary religion and thus, an enemy of the church. This task, while not my responsibility alone nor solely within my power to attain, is where my attention lies.
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