Harold Vogelaar: Interfaith Pioneer

Currents in Theology & Mission
June 2006, Volume 33, Number 3

This summer Harold Vogelaar will retire as Professor of World Religions at LSTC. For the better part of two decades he has worked here to build bridges of understanding in Chicago between Christians and Muslims, exploring this relationship in both seminary classroom and in many local congregations. This teaching and interfaith ministry followed years of service in Cairo and the Middle East, where he worked as a missionary for the Reformed Church in America and the ELCA. There he served congregations, was a hospital chaplain, and taught at and directed the Center for Study of Religion at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo. In his early years of retirement he will direct LSTC's new center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice. His wife Mai, a Muslim who hails from Thailand, often joins him in congregational and other forums. The seminary was recently blessed with a generous gift that will endow the chair Harold now holds and establish this new interfaith center. His presence at LSTC began as part of the worldwide ELCA strategy to seek dialogue with Muslims and Islam, a strategy that has taken on added urgency with the current international tensions. The essays in this issue are a tribute to him, as they explore manifold implications of his own pioneering efforts.

Kathleen D. Billman and James Kenneth Echols note that Harold Vogelaar describes Christian witness as an art of friendship. He is a quintessential practictioner of such friendship and also a sojourner ready to let go and entrust the work he does to the voices and hands that will come after. So may we all be.. [ Download this article - PDF ]

William E. Lesher was president of LSTC when Harold Vogelaar joined the faculty, and he describes many of the accomplishments in interfaith understanding that Harold has achieved. He also tells how inter-religious conversations have led to new insights on how a particular religion relates to other religions. The Lutheran focus on justification by grace, for example, is a strange notion to most people of other religious and spiritual traditions, and it raises an urgent question about our responsibility toward people who do not know Christ. While the stories of religious and spiritual traditions differ widely and have little in common at the conceptual or theological level, many discoveries of deep commonalities are being made at the ethical and spiritual levels. We should embrace every opportunity to engage with people of other faiths as people of faith. The once-for-all act of God, embedded in the doctrine of justification, should enable us to perceive that that which has happened for us has happened for all human beings and indeed for the whole creation. We should share the revelation of God's grace in Jesus Christ with conviction but without contention. As we learn more about the depth and greatness that is contained in the world's religions, our own sense of the awesome mystery of God will be magnified. [ Download this article - PDF ]

Ghulam-Haider Aasi is a Muslim scholar who has regularly team-taught with Harold Vogelaar at the seminary. He tells of his own experiences in interfaith dialogue, beginning in his native Pakistan. Graduate study in the United States exposed him both to claims that all religions are only the products of particular historical milieus and cultural contexts and to opportunistic proselytization. He pays high praise to Ismail R. al-Faruqi, who was a pioneer in interfaith conversations from the Muslim side, and who advocated the establishment of educational institutions in the United States where Muslims could study their own traditions authentically and critically. Aasi's work at the American Islamic College in Chicago brought him into contact with the bridge-building work of Harold Vogelaar. He describes four major Muslim groups in the United States and their divergent approaches to interfaith dialogue. While the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the World Council of Churches, and the National Council of Churches have supported friendship and respectful dialogue with Islam, the same cannot be said for many in the Evangelical camp. One of the great challenges for both Christians and Muslims is how to share the great advances in interfaith understanding with the grassroots.

Nelly van Doorn-Harder discusses the abiding significance of Patriarch Kyrillos VI, whose reign over the Coptic Orthodox Church extended from 1959 to 1971. Anba Kyrillos was not just a holy man, but he was also brilliant in reading the signs and needs of his time. Kyrillos pursued his vision for monastic renewal with great determination, but he also stressed that through Christ's message lay people could become vehicles of change just as much as those living the monastic life. Patriarch Kyrillos set out to revive the past and infuse it into the needs of the present. Three examples of such recovery of the past are his living the monastic life in the public eye, his rebuilding the ancient pilgrimage site of St. Menas in Maryoutis, and his allowing women to reenter official church activities. The effects of his reign as Patriarch can be compared with the influential works of Pope John XXIII and Ghandi.

James A. Scherer reports on the novel missionary strategy of the Lutheran Church in America that used people like Harold Vogelaar, on loan from the Reformed Church in America, for its work in the Middle East. After long-time service in Cairo, Harold came to LSTC in 1984 to develop an interface between Christianity and Islam in America. With his excellent command of Arabic and love for Islamic people, Harold quickly gained the confidence of local Muslim leaders in Chicago. Recently more than a dozen Turkish scholars of Islam have come to Chicago to study in M.A. programs under grants from the Niagara Foundation. Much earlier, another Reformed missionary, Samuel M. Zwemer became known as the American "apostle to Islam." The new Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice at LSTC does not fit easily under older paradigms of mission or even religious dialogue. For Muslims interfaith dialogue from the outset excludes the possibility of conversion and operates solely for the advancement of Islam. How then will dialogue develop when the basic attitude toward the scriptures of the two faiths is so fundamentally different? One urgent aspect of the new Center's work must be to recall Christians to their historic role as committed disciples of Christ and advocates for the Great Commission.

Michael Shelley is another pastor-scholar mentored into the Muslim world by Harold Vogelaar. Both the Bible and the Qur'ān see a close relationship between humanity and the rest of creation. The Bible, for example, declares that humans are created in God's image in order to symbolize and exercise God's dominion over the earth. Humans are not slaves of God, but God's agents to whom much is given and from whom much is expected. In the Qur'ān the task of being God's vice-regents or deputies is also given to the whole human community. God even instructs the angels to prostrate themselves before Adam, indicating that God's lordship itself is at stake in the human role. The optimism in both the Bible and the Qur'ān about humanity's role in the world seems to overestimate human potential when one considers human injustice and foolishness, but this also suggests interfaith conversation about how together we might carry out our calling.

Mark N. Swanson draws implications from three figures who withdrew into the "Arabian wilderness" for refreshment and renewal: Saul (Paul), Jesus, and Luther. Such a retreat is necessary for us too as we reevaluate our theological identity and language in order to communicate effectively God's Good News. The current focus on security in the United States is often at the expense of the other ninety-five percent of the world's population. The Christian confession implies that we belong first of all to the human race and only secondarily to family and nation. An imperialistic drive and materialistic values indelibly mark our society and even our churches. A Christo-centric hermeneutic will free us from considering the frequently violent picture of God in Scripture as the Word of God. The biblical tradition affirms that God's saving activity and revelation are universally present and also that Jesus is the authentic concretization of God's activity and revelation. The vulnerability and suffering of God offer an authentic critique of Christian imperialism. Can we as a contemporary Jesus movement return to the priority of compassion and love and God's call to the vulnerability of divine servanthood embodied in Jesus?

Mark W. Thomsen draws implications from three figures who withdrew into the "Arabian wilderness" for refreshment and renewal: Saul (Paul), Jesus, and Luther. Such a retreat is necessary for us too as we reevaluate our theological identity and language in order to communicate effectively God's Good News. The current focus on security in the United States is often at the expense of the other ninety-five percent of the world's population. The Christian confession implies that we belong first of all to the human race and only secondarily to family and nation. An imperialistic drive and materialistic values indelibly mark our society and even our churches. A Christo-centric hermeneutic will free us from considering the frequently violent picture of God in Scripture as the Word of God. The biblical tradition affirms that God's saving activity and revelation are universally present and also that Jesus is the authentic concretization of God's activity and revelation. The vulnerability and suffering of God offer an authentic critique of Christian imperialism. Can we as a contemporary Jesus movement return to the priority of compassion and love and God's call to the vulnerability of divine servanthood embodied in Jesus? [ Download this article - PDF ]

Ralph W. Klein
Editor

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