Transcendent and Immanent

Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios

[Excerpts from his discourse at the fifth plenary session of the Assembly of the World’s Religions]

“Now I must come to my own vision of some aspects of the renewal that must come into a reordering of the Christian heritage. The first and the most important problem is that Christianity conceives itself as a belief system. This has to be corrected, not by abandoning beliefs, but by realizing that the most important thing in the Christian way is the life of the community, not what it believes. What it believes may be the foundation for the life of the community, but unless the life of community manifests the belief in practice, the beliefs mean little.

The second problem, related to the first, is that we advertise ourselves too much, and talk about Christianity rather than about God, humanity, and the love of God for all humanity. While our self-advertisement becomes more and more fervent, the quality of the product we advertise goes down. We need both to improve the product and cut back on the advertising. We have to improve the product before we talk too much about it.

Third, we have to resolve the conflict between personal salvation and social renewal. We often have seen these as separate alternatives. Either you go and seek your own personal salvation, or you devote yourself to changing society. I’m afraid this is a problem in other religions also. In many religions the basic quest is for one’s own spiritual salvation, with very little care and compassion for a suffering humanity…

The fourth major thing that we have to do is to overcome the exclusive/inclusive dichotomy among world religions. What is the peculiar heritage of West Asian religions? Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are religions in which God is regarded as absolutely transcendent. We have made a claim for ourselves as a chosen people over against the rest of the world. This exclusivism is perhaps a peculiarity of West Asian religion, which my East Asian friends do not always understand. And when they want us to adopt their more inclusive point of view, I would like to say: not so fast. Let us see where the two views meet, because the exclusive is also an essential aspect of my consciousness. I cannot simply say the whole of humanity without distinctions. I see the whole of humanity in the context of my Christianness. It is my deep-rootedness in Christian faith that enables me to be inclusive. And this is not exclusivity: it is a partial closing, which is necessary in order to be fully open. God is not just transcendent; but is also immanent in the universe. The otherness and the oneness have to be kept in dialectical tension…”

— Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios [Assembly of the World’s Religions 1985 (Paragon House)] pp. 174-175.

Pope Francis

“A clear sense of one’s own identity and a capacity for empathy are the point of departure for all dialogue.”

— Pope Francis [Meeting with the Asian Bishops at the Shrine of Haemi (2014a:16)].