Introduction: Sharing a World
A. N. Wilson begins his tract Against Religion with the following words:
It is said in the Bible that the love of money is the root of all evil. It might be truer to say that the love of God is the root of all evil. Religion is the tragedy of mankind. It appeals to all that is noblest, purest, loftiest in the human spirit, and yet there scarcely exists a religion which has not been responsible for wars, tyrannies and the suppression of the truth.
As a religious leader I do not take that proposition lightly. I spent the whole of the Gulf War in Israel with my family, watching our children put on their gas-masks as, thirty-nine times, Scud missiles rained down on civilian targets in a country not at war with Iraq. None of us knew until the war was over whether the next would contain chemical weapons. I know that religion kills.
But so does the absence of religion. People have killed in the name of God. But their crimes do not rival the crimes of those who have killed believing that they were gods. The greatest crimes of this century, those of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, were committed by secular regimes, and they remind us of the force of the words of Abraham, “I said to myself, ‘There is no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me’” (Genesis 20:11). Christian theologians have written about Christian guilt for the Holocaust, and there can be no denying that racial antisemitism had its roots in religious anti-Judaism. Nonetheless, the distinguished Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has argued that Christianity, so long as it was the dominant belief, actually prevented a Holocaust. Christians had every interest in preserving Jews, albeit as pariahs, as evidence of the truth of Christianity. The Holocaust, he says, was possible only when religious prejudice was freed from religious restraints. George Steiner traces a direct line in German thought from Nietzsche’s declaration of the “death of God” to the attempted murder, sixty years later, of the people of God.
Wilson’s critique is too easy. Religion is not the source of evil. Humanity is, and religion is sometimes powerless to prevent it. But a question remains. How is it that a religion based on love can have a history of hate, and one which values peace can engage in holy war?
It was Reinhold Niebuhr, in his Moral Man and Immoral Society, who pointed out the difference between the behaviour of individuals and groups. Individuals “are endowed by nature with a measure of sympathy and consideration for their kind.” They can behave with great altruism. Once organised into groups, however, “there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism.” That difference is magnified when applied to religion.
Traditions of faith bind us together as communities. Through our several religious heritages we arrive at a special sense of kinship and compassion towards those who share our belief and way of life. But the very walls we build around ourselves for mutual protection serve to divide us from those who do not belong to the group. Forming an “Us” also creates a “Them.” There is a difference between insiders and outsiders. “We have truth, they do not. We have the salvation that they are denied.” It is relatively easy to love our neighbour as ourself. It is considerably more difficult to love the stranger, the outsider, the one whose way of life is so unlike our own. The stronger are the bonds of fellowship within a community, the more likely is there to be suspicion and fear of those outside. That is why a religion, even as it promotes peace within its own borders, can inspire war across the frontiers of faith.
This fact is always disturbing, but there are times when it is simply intolerable. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, those who had seen into the abyss came to a conclusion: Never again. Never again should hostility be allowed to fester between peoples, races and religions, for the road that begins with hatred in the heart can end in attempted genocide. Thus began the great conversation across faiths, most notably between Judaism and Christianity, in an effort to find another way. Dialogue has been one of the great religious achievements of the past half-century, and it has promoted a new mood of mutual understanding and respect. But its work has hardly begun. There are too many parts of the world and too many faith communities it has not yet touched. Religion is still used to defend ethnic or national rivalries, and it still claims human sacrifices.
In Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Bosnia and elsewhere, religion fuels the flames of conflict, justifying the unjustifiable and allowing people to believe that by aggression, terrorism and murder they contribute to the greater glory of God. At such times the voice of religious leadership must be heard, loud and unequivocally, saying: This is not the way. God is found in life, not death; in reconciliation, not hate; in justice, not vengeance; in peace, not war.
The rabbis of the first centuries of the Common Era communicated profound truths in a deceptively simple way. Commenting on the phrase “the God of faith” (Deuteronomy 32:4) they said, “This means the God who had faith in the world He was about to create.” In that sentence lies an extraordinary suggestion of the risk God took when He made mankind.
Biblical faith, with its emphasis on free will and responsibility, constantly holds before us the paradox of human history. There are times when we scale the heights of goodness. But there are others when we descend to the depths of evil. Modern thought has focused on the wrong question. It has asked how God could have created nature. The rabbis posed a question altogether more profound. How could God have created man? It is one thing to believe that God in His goodness made the universe. It is another to believe that God in His goodness made a form of life, homo sapiens, capable of inflicting untold cruelty and suffering on its own members. The Torah says that before the Flood, contemplating the violence that filled the world, God “regretted that He had made man on earth and His heart was filled with pain” (Genesis 6:6). After Auschwitz, that verse echoes with almost unbearable pathos.
The rabbis gave a remarkable answer. Creation testifies not merely to God’s power but also, as it were, to His belief in mankind. At the heart of religion is not just the faith we have in God. No less significant is the faith God has in us. That faith is surely often tested. It is tested when we turn our back on God. It is tested no less when we commit evil in His name. Yet He does not lose faith that one day we will learn this: that God has given us many universes of faith but only one world in which to live together.
