Professor Lovat reflects on the religious landscape of Australia. He discusses the question: What can we learn in a multi¬-faith society?

What is there to be gained from living in a multi-faith and multicultural Australia?  One answer is general and the other is specific.

General: I think young people growing up in this kind of society have a stronger appreciation that religion is a universal experience. It’s not just something that the Catholic Church is ‘into,’ while the rest of the world doesn’t bother with such things. Belief in what is beyond the ‘see and touch’ world is as old as humanity itself and is truly a cross-cultural experience.

Seeing things this way might make young people more critical of their religion, because they have more to compare it with. It might make them appreciate more deeply the role that religion plays in being human.

Specifics: Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam have something special to add to our religious experience. Buddhism is a spin-off from Hinduism, a little like Christianity growing out of Judaism.

Hinduism is the great religion of India. It’s the oldest of the major religions. It’s a different religion from Christianity, often being described as ‘sensuous.’  There is a rich understanding of God.

God is everywhere and in many forms: there is a manifestation of God for every moment in life, a God for love, war, doubt, despair, a God to overcome difficulties etc. Each of these Gods (all part of the one God) is a specialist.

This allows the Hindu to relate to someone in the divine family who is tailor-made for the occasion. The Hindu Gods tend to be family-oriented: they marry, have families and their own challenges. This allows Hindus to relate in a personal way to the Gods, as though their Gods truly understand what they are going through.

Hinduism is a different kind of religion from the ones most of us are used to. Some dismiss it as having nothing to offer, but others feel a greater freedom to explore and expand their understandings of the spiritual world.

The great Benedictine monk, Dom Bede Griffiths, went to India to become a missionary. By the end of his life, he claimed to have learned much about God from Hinduism that he would never have learned had he simply been exposed to only Christianity. He claimed to have become a better Christian because he had let himself soak up the richness of Hinduism.

The other religion that has so much to teach us about God is Islam. In spite of the awful image that Islam has in our times (not helped by the media), Islam is in fact a truly beautiful religion. It’s also one that has preserved much of the essential message of both Judaism and Christianity. For the Jew or Christian truly interested in knowing the origins of their own tradition, Islam is a ‘must.’

The founder of Islam, Prophet Muhammad truly believed that Islam was the completion of what Abraham, Moses and Jesus had been on about. He saw all of these as prophets of God who believed that God wanted to form the People of God who would show the world how to live godly lives of personal integrity and social justice.
In a word, this is what Moses tried to form when he led the people to the Promised Land, but in fact the people became too caught up with the institutional side of life. The prophets of old reminded them of this but they “failed to heed the warnings of the prophets” (says the New Testament). Jesus tried to fulfil the same idea in what became known as the Christian church. The Acts of the Apostles tell us that the early church clearly lived as an ideal community where everyone shared their goods and lived a life of devotion to God.

By the time Muhammad came along, 600 years after Jesus, he believed that the Church had become too concerned with the institutional side of things. Like Judaism before it, Christianity had slipped from its own ideals. While he truly believed that the God of the Jews and Christians was the one and only God, he believed that a refreshed spirituality had to be formed to capture what God wanted of his people.
This new spirituality became Islam

and the new community of Muslims became the Ummah (the community of God), just as Abraham, Moses and Jesus had wanted it, so Muhammad thought. The early centuries of Islam provide examples of remarkable tolerance and social justice.

For instance, a Jew was better off living in an Islamic than a Christian world and even many Christians were better off living in an Islamic world than in parts of Christendom. This is because Muhammad was explicit in laying down the law of tolerance by Muslims towards Jews and Christians. He had no time for narrow-minded bigotry.

As well as this ground¬breaking multicultural tolerance, it would probably come as a great surprise to many to know that Islam boasts some of the world’s first schemes designed to eradicate poverty, to provide education for all its citizens and to bring equality to women.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Islam for Christians is in the place it holds for Jesus. In many ways, Jesus is second only to Muhammad as a sacred hero. Muhammad was influenced by Jesus but it seems to have been the Jesus of the early church more than the Jesus most Christians worshipped in the seventh century.

The ‘Muslim Jesus,’ as he is described, is rather like the gospel Jesus, except even more strongly so. He speaks many of the words we read in the gospels but says even more, and more adamantly.

Let me quote just a couple of excerpts: “The disciples said, ‘Look at the house of God, how beautiful it is.’ Jesus said ‘I say to you ...God does nothing with silver and gold. More dear to God than all this are the pure in heart.”  In another place, “God hates a servant who acquires religious knowledge and then uses it as a craft over others ... too much knowledge only increases pride if one does not act in accordance with it.” One can see the same Jesus who confronted the priests and Pharisees but, if anything, he is even more hostile to the hypocrisy of false religion. Why is it that the Muslim Jesus is an even more strident version of the Jesus that Christians learn about? Could it be that Islam has
actually preserved something of the original Jesus lost a little over time?

Some ask if the quest for the historical Jesus might actually be realised eventually through Christians
learning from Islam. This is really not such a radical idea. After all, the great Christian saint, Thomas Aquinas, learned much from Islam in the Middle Ages and freely acknowledged it.

These are just some of the riches to be found in the wider world of religion. In a multi-faith society, we have the opportunity to explore these important matters through dialogue. If more people understood how much there is to learn from each other, there would be less bigotry and strife between believers. Those living in a multi-faith society should always remember the words of the great World War II martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He said, “God wanted always to be Lord of the World, but religious traditions tend to turn him into the General Manager of their particular branch office.” 

Reprinted from Aurora, tabloid of Catholic Diocese of Maitland/Newcastle. Professor Terry Lovat is Pro Vice-Chancellor of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle, NSW.

Professor Terry Lovat