The fourth Frederick Charles Furlong Memorial Lecture | Sunday, October 28, 2007
Abraham and the Culture of Dialogue
Speaker: Dr Jane McAuliffe
Dean and Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences,
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Abstract: Abraham’s transformation from a scriptural stalwart to the new-found star of interfaith dialogue has certainly accelerated in this decade. Countless groups—local, regional, national and international—have sprouted in recent years, all of which invoke his name to bless their different agendas and diverse missions. Jews, Christians, and Muslims, together and separately, lay claim to his legacy and both the Bible and the Qur’an foreground Abraham as the father of faith and a token of human fecundity. The complex character created through a trans-scriptural reading of the relevant narratives fascinates us with its disclosures of divine intimacy, of marital tension and of prospective child murder.
But how does this multi-faceted delineation serve as a metaphor, or model or motivator of inter-religious dialogue? Do our depictions of Abraham draw us together or divide us? Can his patriarchal shoulders sustain the weight of expectation that contemporary interfaith aspirations have placed upon them? This symposium has been convened under the title of “Abraham’s Light” and one of the qur’anic passages reprinted in the program prospectus portrays Abraham’s search for his Sustainer through the stars, the moon and the sun. With its keynotes of perplexity and persistence, of illumination and obscuration this passage can serve as a fitting prelude to a consideration of Abraham and the culture of dialogue.
Furlong Symposium | Monday, October 29, 2007
Main presentations:
1. Studying Abraham–Together
Professor Peter Ochs
Professor of Modern Judaic Studies, University of Virginia
Abstract: Do Jews, Muslims, and Christians share one Abraham or three? The way to find out is to study the scriptural sources and traditions about Abraham. But how to study? To honour their religious traditions, Jews, Muslims, and Christians typically study apart from one another according to (at least) three different traditions of how to study. In this case, there can be no less than three traditions of understanding Abraham and, in that sense, three separate Abrahams. Is it also possible for Jews, Muslims, and Christians to study together? The university offers a setting for shared study, but it typically requires setting aside the religious traditions and examining scriptural texts and commentaries through the light of textual and historical science alone. Is the Abraham of academic science the Abraham of any religion?
This lecture explores a third option: a way to gather Jews, Muslims, and Christians together in shared study of the three scriptural traditions, honouring religious faith as well as the reasoning that arises through dialogue among participants from the three faiths. This is reasoning about the Abraham of scripture, and it moves back and forth between the three Abrahams and the one.
2. Islamic Messianic Thought as an Expression of Abrahamic Covenant
Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina
Professor of Islamic and Shi'ite Studies, University of Virginia
Abstract: Abraham in the Qur’an is the patriarch of all monotheists. He is “muslim” and “unitarian” (muwahhid). He is the founder of the cult of Ka’ba, as the House of God, and the paradigm for the worshippers of One God until the End of Time. Although references to Moses, as the lawgiver, and to the Speech of God are far more numerous throughout Islamic revelation, Abraham occupies an exclusive place as the role model to unite all those who submit to God.
At the same time, it is Abraham’s legacy that continues to divide Noah’s one nation under the divine law (the ummatan wahida). It is not simply the divide between the two sons of Abraham. Nor is it simply the rivalry between Jerusalem and Mecca (the two centres of spiritual compass ascribed to the two locations of Abraham’s test regarding the sacrifice of the “first born”). Abraham’s encounter with God at that particular moment in the religious history of Judaism and Islam is closely interwoven with the End of History—messianic expectation and deliverance of humanity.