Fundamental exchange: conversation at Tantur - Israel - Column

Christian Century, July 27, 1994 by Martin E. Marty

Fundamentalisms usually get talked about separately. And though scholars may try to treat these religious movements comparatively, usually each gets talked about behind its back by the others. But for four days at Tantur, the ecumenical institute on the Bethlehem road just south of Jerusalem, scholars joined with fundamentalists and with Jews, Christians and Muslims uneasy about or put off by their faith's fundamentalists. They met at one of the world's tensest cities for such an encounter to hear about one another and, possibly, to listen to one another. The children of Abraham and their innumerable subgroups have enough trouble coexisting without the catalyst of fundamentalist intensities. to agitate them. But at Tantur these intensities were allowed to be present.

Reminders of where we were came as early as dawn when we heard helicopters above our dormitories. Each day Palestinians accustomed to working in Jerusalem but now largely prevented from doing so scaled the walls south of the center. Israeli police, guided by helicopters, chased them under the olive trees and back over the wall. They detained some for a couple of hours, until it was too late in the day for them to find work. A few of the people who took in our conference also had to scale the wall each day.

Inside the conference hall were other walls to scale-those figurative walls erected by believers through the centuries of distance from one another. And atop these were the metaphoric bits of jagged glass and razor wire cemented in by fundamentalists. The wonder of the conference was that participants genuinely worked to understand one another.

I spoke about the role that "land" plays in these uncompromising religious movements. James D. G. Dunn of Durham expounded scriptural views - chiefly of Christian literalists, but easily rendered applicable to other groups. Notre Dame's Rabbi Michael A. Signer located the contemporary Jewish versions of fundamentalism in Jewish history. A lively interplay of themes occurred when Yaakov Ariel of Hebrew University (but on his way to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Gideon Aran, also of Hebrew University, described, respectively, Christian fundamentalists in Israel and Jewish fundamentalists in Israel.

Emergent by then was a basic fissure within the Christian community. On the one hand are Christian fundamentalists, most of them American-based, who are premillennialist supporters of Israel as a nation. For them Israel's survival is crucial in the movement toward Armageddon and the return of Christ. Israelis who have welcomed the support of such premillennialists are embarrassed when they hear the context of that support.

On the other hand are the "local" Christians - Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. Only a few members of this religious minority were allowed by the authorities to attend. These believers claim that their relations to Muslim and Jewish neighbors are compromised and threatened when the aggressive premillennialists and other fundamentalists are portrayed as the Christian voice on the West Bank, in Jerusalem and elsewhere. To have these Christians present along with the fundamentalists was one of the triumphs of the conference planners.

Things heated up when Jonathan Kuttab, described as "Palestinian Christian lawyer and human rights activist, East Jerusalem," beguiled and polarized the audience with an eloquent, impassioned plea for Palestinian Christian and Muslim rights. A few questioners from the floor wondered what had happened to academic distance as Kuttab brought us up close to the passions of the scene, but most agreed that his presence was a valuable reminder of the way the world around Tantur works.

But Tantur itself works. That was Bthe reality that stood out to this participant-observer. Tantur's board involves the University of Notre Dame, which was a cosponsor of the conference (with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation). The school was represented by a team headed by President Edward Molloy and President Emeritus Theodore Hesburgh. The Notre Dame contingent should have liked what it saw and realized again the value of its investment. The visitors saw the diplomatic and theological finesse of Tantur's rector, Thomas Stransky, and of Notre Dame theology professor Lawrence Cunningham.

What occurred at Tantur, one believes and hopes, can be replicated in other environs where the three religions and their right wings meet and collide. Intellectual intifadas or repressions have done nothing except set back efforts at coexistence and constructive interaction. If impassioned activists and believers situate themselves in contexts both scholarly and spiritual, they may hear one another and find ways to make possible the always threatened mutual survival of the children of Abraham. Believers put the world at risk in the name of faiths that possess their own versions and resources of shalom and salam, a groundwork almost never made visible or audible in each other's hearing and experience.