In our pluralistic society we will have the opportunity to interact with people of many faiths as well as many with no faith. We should not be so egocentric as to believe that God cannot speak through other people and therefore we should be prepared to listen. We should not be so timid as to believe that God cannot speak through us and therefore we need to be prepared to articulate our own faith, not as a set of ideas but as a lived experience.
We should recognize as we encounter all types of diversity in our world from religious beliefs to lifestyle that God is totally and absolutely different from us. It is only as we are able to relate to that which is different from us that we grow in our capacity to relate to God who is utterly different from us.
We do not need to accept the proposition that all truths are relative to understand that none of us possess the absolute truth. We must continue to remain open to God’s continuing revelation from the least likely of sources. Cannot God speak a word of truth to us through the words of an atheist? We do not need to deny that in Christ we have encountered the absolute truth to accept the fact that we have yet to fully understand the truth of Christ.
Is it possible that God might reveal a truth about our faith which we had denied through the words of a Buddhist monk? To listen carefully to what the monk has to say is to trust in the sovereignty of God who is not constrained by the limitations of our orthodoxy. In the same way that Jesus can recognize the faith of a foreigner as greater than that found among the people of God, so we can recognize that often we are humbled and chastened by the faith we encounter in one who believes totally differently than we do.
This does not mean that we have to question the truth of our faith but only that we can be awakened by the faith of another to our need to be more faithful in our own beliefs.
