Seminarium

The Elements of Great Teaching

Strange/Familiar/Strange

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“Strange/Familiar/Strange.”  I got this metaphor from my friend Richard Payne, professor and Dean of the Institute for Buddhist Studies out in Berkeley, California.  This is the way he has described the process of coming to understand a different culture and/or religion, and I have been thinking about it a lot since I read it.

Domesticating Strangeness

As you might imagine, the point of this language is to indicate that often, when we are introduced to another religious tradition, it is “strange” to us. Typically, the belief system is very different, with different starting presuppositions than what are found in Christianity, and even different core commitments and values.  In addition, of course, many practices are “strange”—devotional practices, rites of passage, rituals and holy days, etc.

The usual response to this “strangeness” is an effort to domesticate it, or at least make it a little more recognizable.  And the means by which this typically occurs is by using one’s own Christian religious categories to characterize religious practices/beliefs of another tradition.  Here, then, we have move into the “familiar” aspect of the paradigm.  So, for example, even though Christians have different conventions that govern their individual and corporate prayer life, it is easy for most Christians to understand and even identify with the forms that govern daily prayer in Islam.  It’s not the same, but it is similar, and so Christians are able to more easily appreciate and engage with it.

Warmth AND Paternalism?

This is the stage at which many Christians get excited about interreligious dialogue.  They have found a point of convergence, which means they often feel like they finally “get” something about the other tradition. This is a fun, comfortable place to be:  listening and learning from another tradition, and relating the new information to what one knows from one’s own tradition.

However, can you see the challenges that might result if that’s as far as the conversation goes?  If interreligious teaching and learning simply ends here, in the warm fuzziness of the familiar, too often the result is that the “otherness” of the new religious tradition ends up getting subsumed—like what happens when a child disappears in the arms of an adult in a big hug.  Does that sounds like a strange example to use?  I actually use it quite intentionally, because it points to both the warmth AND the paternalism that is at work here.

I get that many Christians stay in this place because they are genuinely enjoying engaging with another tradition, but sometimes what is happening at the same time is that one’s own Christian framework is being imported into and overlaid on top of the “other.” Often without even realizing it, then, Christians end up interpreting aspects of another tradition through their own lens, distorting it to make it “fit” their own categories—of salvation, sin, worship, whatever.  And, in the process, the superiority of Christianity is asserted, as the norming yardstick by which other religions are measured.

Allowing Strangeness

This is why that final “strange” is of such critical importance:  it helps us to resist facile analogies and arrogant presumptions of knowledge that lead to a sort of religious colonialism, whereby everything is interpreted and judged by the standard of Christianity; and anything that doesn’t “fit” is rejected or discarded.  Allowing the “strangeness” of the other to remain preserves its uniqueness, its inherent value, and its authority—it does not have to “prove” its worth against Christian doctrine and values.  It’s not as comforting, to be sure, but it is more honest; and, in the end, more fruitful for sustained interreligious conversation and growth.

Interreligious Learning and Teaching: A Christian Rationale for a Transformative PraxisI don’t use this paradigm in my new book, Interreligious Learning and Teaching: A Christian Rationale for a Transformative Praxis, but I think it helps illustrate much of what I am trying to say there.  Interreligious study is so important for preparing all people of faith to be both good neighbors and also “good” members of their own religious traditions, but the temptation to interpret away the differences between religions must be strenuously avoided.  In my view, the goal isn’t that we all be “one,” but that together we respect, learn from and appreciate our “many-ness.”


 Interreligious Learning and Teaching: A Christian Rationale for a Transformative Praxis is part of the Seminarium Elements book series.

Order today at fortresspress.com and Amazon.com.

Photo credit: “Strange Things Are Happening These Days!” Copyright Koshy Koshy. Licensed for reuse by CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

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Recently named Interim Dean of Gettysburg Seminary, Dr. Kristin Johnston Largen joined the faculty in the summer of 2006, bringing a diverse and expansive background in systematic theology. She teaches a variety of theological loci courses, with a particular focus on soteriology. She also teaches comparative theology, and specializes in Buddhism and Hinduism. She is committed to the training of public theologians at Gettysburg Seminary, and believes strongly in the relevance of systematic theology both to one’s public ministry and to one’s personal faith life.

Previous to her arrival at Gettysburg Seminary, she taught at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Largen is an ordained member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and has received theological training at Wartburg Theological Seminary, the Augustana Hochschule in Neuendettelsau, Germany, and the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, California, where she earned her doctoral degree. She is the editor of Dialog: a Journal of Theology, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue.

She is the author of What Christians Can Learn from Buddhism:  Rethinking Salvation (Fortress Press, 2009), Baby Krishna, Infant Christ:  A Comparative Theology of Salvation (Orbis Books, 2011); and a 2014 title for the Seminarium: Elements series (Fortress Press) called:  Interreligious Learning and Teaching: A Christian Rationale for a Transformative Praxis.