Probably two decades ago, I was sitting in a faculty meeting, frustrated with some new policy just announced, and I turned to one of my colleagues after a faculty meeting and said, “That ticks me off.” He laughed and replied, “You’re always ticked off.”
It was a stinging, revelatory moment for me. I had developed, it appeared on further reflection, something of an addiction to the rush of being offended.
About that time in my life I rediscovered the beautiful prayer traditionally attributed to Francis of Assisi:
Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. [1]
To seek to understand rather than first to be understood: first to listen well rather than indulge my self-righteous being offended: What if we were to take this approach as a theological method? Heck, what if we took it as a basic life posture?
Rather than a posture of fear, condemnation, or resentment, what would it mean to employ what Alan Jacobs calls a “hermeneutic of love”? [2] What would it mean to seek to read texts and engage in theological conversation, political conversation, debates about educational policies, with no other goal than to love God and neighbor and enemy? Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace employs different terminology but a similar approach, which he calls “double vision.” He does not mean by this “fuzzy vision.” Instead, he calls us to look at things from another perspective, namely, the perspective of our enemies. In doing so, we may be able to see things we could not possibly see otherwise:
We enlarge our thinking by letting the voices and perspectives of others, especially those with whom we may be in conflict, resonate within ourselves, by allowing them to help us see them, as well as ourselves, from their perspective, and if needed, readjust our perspectives as we take into account their perspectives. Nothing can guarantee in advance that the perspectives will ultimately merge and agreement be reached. We may find that we must reject the perspective of the other. [3]
But such a practice may also allow us, he notes, to bring our different conceptions alongside one another so that our different understandings enrich one another and perhaps even issue forth in unexpected forms of agreement.
This is no call to some intellectually lazy relativism. On the one hand, it is important for us to reject the modernist conceit that it is possible to “see things as they really are,” to see, as it were, with God’s eyes. But to reject such an intellectual arrogance—that we can simply see things with timeless, universal eyes—is not the same thing as saying that one opinion is as good as any other. [4] But it is a call to intellectual humility. We are all finite human beings, belabored not only with our finitude but also with prejudices and presuppositions and our own experiences. That is, we all see things from our own perspective. All our knowing is “socially located.” We see things as we see them, and at our best, we seek to describe the world as we see it and understand it, fairly and without self-promoting agendas, but all the while acknowledging that our seeing and knowing are inescapably mediated through our time, place, experience, and often, ill motives.
Try it. You may like it. And it may be that such an approach actually engenders more good work in the world than being ticked off all the time.
This is adapted from Lee C. Camp, Who Is My Enemy: Questions American Christians Must Face About Islam and Themselves. Click here to purchase Kindle. Click here to purchase paperback.
[1] Text taken from “A Prayer Attributed to St. Francis,” in The (Online) Book of Common Prayer (under “Prayers and Thanksgivings”), www.bcponline.org.
[2] Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001).
[3] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Other- ness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 213. Throughout this section, I am indebted to Volf’s discussion of this method in Exclusion and Embrace.
[4] Volf puts it well: our task is not simply to affirm plurality, as if any one view of justice is as good as another. Instead, we must affirm what we believe to be true, must affirm and act upon what we believe to be just. But we must, simultaneously, “nurture an awareness of our own fallibility” (218). Of much import, James Wm. McClendon Jr. identifies the “principle of fallibility” as one of the two “constitutive rules” for doing theology in a third stream of Christianity, alongside Catholicism and Protestantism, the so-called baptist (little “b”) or “Believers’ Church” strand. See McClendon, Ethics, vol. 1, Systematic Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1986), 45.
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