Stendahl's Three Rules

 

These are three excellent rules for having a substantive and civilized dialogue about religion:

Truman Madsen, now retired as Richard L. Evans Professor of Christian Understanding at Brigham Young University, relates an instructive anecdote about a great New Testament scholar, Krister Stendahl. Stendahl, who taught at Harvard for many years and served as the dean of Harvard Divinity School, also spent a few years as the Lutheran bishop of Stockholm.
During Stendahl's tenure there, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built a temple nearby. As commonly happens when Mormons build a temple, there was complaining, puzzlement, and some opposition among the local people. Bishop Stendahl, who has Latter-day Saint friends and had visited Brigham Young University, reacted dramatically and quite unexpectedly.
He called a press conference, and held it in an LDS stake center. There, among other things, he outlined to the Swedish press three principles that he thought should govern our discussions of the religious beliefs of other people. Prof. Madsen, who was there, summarizes them as:

(1) If you want to know what others believe, ask them. Don't ask their critics or their enemies.
(2) When looking at the religious faith of others, compare your best with their best, not their worst with your best.
(3) Always leave room for "holy envy."

Some explanation and examples will make these three principles clearer.
The first should be fairly obvious. Enemies of a religious faith are unlikely to present it as its believers would. They are, in fact, quite likely to distort it and caricature it -- unwittingly if they are honest, deliberately if (as all too often happens) they are unscrupulous and seek only a cheap and easy victory. This does not necessarily mean that there is no place for critics, or for listening to them. But if we really want to understand another religion, they should not be our first resource.
The second principle is "When looking at the religious faith of others, compare your best with their best, not their worst with your best." We commonly hear people contrast the loving ethics taught by Jesus in the New Testament with the acts of self-proclaimed Islamic terrorists. But it is not at all fair to compare our seldom-achieved moral ideal with horrid crimes that are, despite their prominence in the newspapers and on television, still relatively rare among the world's hundreds of millions of Muslims. The butchery of the "Christian" crusades would be a more appropriate comparison to Islamic terrorism. And the death decree against Salman Rushdie should not be compared to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but to the Inquisition and the burnings of heretics that punctuated the history of the West and lack real parallel in the Islamic East.
Stendahl reminded his Swedish audience of the human element that unavoidably affects even the most pure beliefs. If a religion is revealed, it is nonetheless revealed through fallible mortals. Alluding to the explanation on the title page of the Book of Mormon that "if there are faults they are the mistakes of men," this eminent Lutheran theologian commented that such frankness increased his confidence in the book, rather than decreasing it [Italics added].
Finally, Stendahl counseled his audience to leave room for what he termed "holy envy." We can learn greatly from faithful practitioners and believers of other faiths. The loving, joyous reverence of Orthodox Jews for the Sabbath -- far from the cold, mechanical legalism of the stereotype -- challenges us whose observance of the Lord's day is often routine and perfunctory. Likewise, we can profit by reflecting upon the Jewish passion for religious learning, the simplicity and service of the Mennonites, the heroism of Protestant missionaries under terribly difficult conditions, and the social idealism of Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement.
Regarding Mormons and their temples, Stendahl suggested baptism for the dead as an object of "holy envy." We do nothing for our dead, he said. It is as if we have forgotten them. In contrast, he observed, the Latter-day Saints seek to bring the blessings of Christ's atonement even to the dead.
At a minimum, observing Krister Stendahl's three principles would eliminate much of the religious strife in a world that is growing ever smaller and more interdependent and that can no longer afford such conflict.