Reflection: Questions that will require religious answers

Sydney
4 November 2001

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Reflection: Questions that will require religious answers

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Reflection: Questions that will require religious answers

By Andrew Murray SM

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how the shaking of certainties that we have experienced out of the events during the past two months provides an opportunity for faith. I believe this to be the case both because that shaking may free people for other forms of knowing and because some of the questions that the events have raised will require religious answers.

What is being called the War on Terrorism does, however, raise significant questions about religion itself and about the practice of religion, which we can also expect to reverberate through the world during the next decade. To date, intense discussion about religion in the media has focused on Islam, but the questions will sooner or later raise issues with which Christianity will have to come to terms.

Although this war is not a religious war in the way that these have been understood in the past, it has significant religious dimensions and, as public discussion suggests, it cannot be understood without grappling with religious issues. The outcomes of the discussion will affect how generations of people think about the place of religion and God in their lives.

Osama bin Laden’s statement of October 7 is couched in religious language and sentiment and gives religious justification for the events of September 11. We might be struck by the way in which he gives first place to God and expects every Muslim to “rise to defend his religion”. He implies that religious belief should govern every aspect of a person’s private and public life. His violence is not hard to understand, for it is a consequence of his single-mindedness and of a fundamentalism that dares to claim that the ways of God are easily understood and that bin Laden himself knows them with such clarity that he can easily judge other human beings.

In the West, we do things differently. As a consequence of the religious wars that raged in Europe following the Reformation we have invented arrangements for living that separate political affairs and religious affairs. No longer is our civic life thought to be subject to the control of religious authorities. This secularisation has enabled peoples of different churches and faiths to live peacefully together. Not all, however, have accepted it easily, and questions are often raised about whether our religious convictions inform our public life. Christianity has seen its own forms of fundamentalism rise in opposition to modernity. The Catholic Church has had its battles.

If the Church is to remain relevant, it will need to engage thoughtfully with the questions that people raise. Repetition of old formulae and engagement in old issues will not work, because people will be asking questions with a new slant. While we can insist that God is central to the life of every human being, its mere assertion will sound empty. Our answers need to be expressed in ways appropriate to the questions that are asked.

Fr Murray teaches philosophy at the Catholic Institute of Sydney.