Today, Good Friday, I experienced the confluence of two theological streams – one philosophical and the other devotional. I started with the philosophical on the bus to the United Nations this morning, on my way to participate in “The Way of the Cross, the Way of Peace” which would trace its way down 42^nd Street and end up in Times Square.  I was reading a piece by John Caputo in the recent issue of Tikkun whose featured topic was “God and the 21^st Century.”

Caputo, ever the devoted theologian of postmodernity, described eloquently and engagingly, as he always does, the only God he (and I) can believe in – a God who is thoroughly, intimately, and dangerously part of the ongoing and always messy process of life:  “God is not a warranty for a well-run world, but the name of a promise, an unkept promise, where every promise is also a risk, a flicker of hope on a suffering planet.”  This promise can be kept only if we work with it. The divine “promiser” and the finite “promise-ees” are in this together.

And on this basis, we have an entirely different take on the much ridiculed “God of the gaps” – the God we resort to in order to fill in the holes or gaps of our knowledge or inadequacies, only to find that science keeps filling in the blanks and pushing out God.  The way Caputo puts it can well serve as a zinger for all our “new atheists”: “God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not the gap God fills, but the gap God opens.”

God is that power, that presence, or that something that keeps opening, surprisingly, new gaps, new questions, new possibilities.

Caputo’s philosophical proddings were stirring in my mind as we started the “First Station” of the Way of the Cross in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the UN.  I was waiting for the usual prayer, traditional to Roman Catholic Good Friday liturgies and used in the “Way of the Cross, Way of Justice” that I used to attend in Cincinnati: “We adore thee, O Christ, and we praise thee, because by thy holy cross, thou hast redeemed the world.”  Instead, this is what we read and prayed from the printed program: “We adore you, O  Christ, and we praise you. BY THE POWER OF YOUR HOLY CROSS, HELP US TO CHANGE THE WORLD.”

The difference between those two formulations is the difference between two very different soteriologies – or ways of understanding how Jesus’ death on the cross saves us.  In the first, the cross redeems us by changing God – that is by satisfying God’s demand for reparation or atonement for humanity’s sin.  In the second, the cross redeems us by enabling US to change the world.

The cross doesn’t pay off God.  Rather, what we see and learn from the cross changes our hearts so that we can change the world.

And here is where I reconnected with Caputo’s understanding of the God who opens gaps. The cross and the death of Jesus represent the primary gap or new possibility that Christianity offers the world: on the cross, we see a man who was filled with the Spirit of God and who challenged the powers that be (mainly the Roman Empire) to the point that they decided he had to be “disappeared” and executed.

But rather than respond to the violent hatred of his executioners with hatred, he responded with non-violent love.  He forgave them.

That’s the new gap – the new possibility opened up for humanity:  in order to save or really change this messed up world of hatred, injustice, and greed, we have to confront the powers that have caused this mess.  But when they respond and come after us, we can’t hate them; we have to confront them with the power of love and non-violence.

It may cost us our lives.  But if we die like this – if we confront evil but do not hate the evil-doers even though they kill us – we can change the world.

This gap, this possibility, this way of living cannot be proven to bring the birth or resurrection of a new world.  But given the example of Jesus – as well as so many others like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Archbishop Romer, the Dalai Lama – we can bet our lives on it.

Although I am a Christian theologian, I contend that a just social order must be accountable to not one but many religious communities. If we are going to create a society that is responsive to the humanity of all, then we must not view one religious faith as absolute. Ultimate reality, to which all things are subject, is too mysterious to be exclusively limited to one people’s view of God. Any creation of a just social order must take into account that God has been known and experienced in many different ways. Because we have an imperfect grasp of divine reality, we must not regard our limited vision as absolute. Solidarity among all human communities is  antithetical to religious exclusivism. God’s truth comes in many colors and is revealed in many cultures, histories, and unexpected places. — (James H. Cone, “Black Theology and Solidarity” in Lorine M. Getz and Ruy O. Costa, eds. Struggles for Solidarity: Liberation Theologies in Tension, Minneapolis, M.N.: Fortress Press, 1992, p. 47.)

What a ringing endorsement of the need for inter-religious dialogue and for a more “pluralist” Christian theology of religions!  And it’s coming not from a scholar of comparative religions or from a John-Hick-type philosopher of religion — but from the father of Black Liberation Theology. His words are powerful and challenging for any Christian theology: there can be “no just social order” unless many religions are contributing to it…Ultimate Reality is too big for any one religion… liberating solidarity is “antithetical to religious exclusivism” …  the Christian vision, like all religious visions, is “limited” and cannot regard itself as “absolute.”

Well, if James Cone has served up this endorsement of a more pluralistic theology and dialogue of religions, I would say that the ball is now in the court of us so-called theologians of religions and inter-religious dialoguers.   Cone is basically saying that there cannot be any effective liberation without interreligious dialogue.  I believe that those of us given to the dialogue of religions must respond with the admission that there can be no authentic dialogue without liberation.   If a truly world-wide struggle for liberation calls for the dialogue of many religious communities, then the dialogue of religions must respond by making sure that when religions get together to talk, they don’t just talk about religion.  They have to also talk about the realities of human and environmental suffering due to injustice.

When religious people come together to “dialogue,” the topics must be not only “ultimate reality,” “life after death,” “prayer and meditation;’  the dialogical agenda must also include human rights, poverty, housing, economic disparity, political policies.  And as Jim Cone told me in one of our first conversations after I came to join the faculty here at Union Theological Seminary,  inter-religious dialogue here in the United States must also talk about White Supremacy.

And of course, when religious people come together to talk about liberation and overcoming injustice, they can’t just talk.  They will also have to act — to walk the talk together.   James Cone, occupied all his life with the reality of racial and economic injustice, recognizes that he also has to engage in inter-religious dialogue.   Christian theologians of religions (also called “comparative theologians”), occupied with the need for dialogue, must recognize that they have to engage in efforts toward liberation.

“Liberation and dialogue” — the two have to go together.  James Cone realized that back in the early 90s.   I hope that more and more people — theologians or whoever — can share that realization.