David Vishanoff (HF 2001, University of Oklahoma) Like many of you, I am not yet convinced that the faith by which I seek to live has sufficiently transformed the work I do. In my case, that work consists of scholarship and teaching in the field of Islamic studies. Ah, you say, an easy vocation in which to integrate one’s faith! Since my Christian beliefs are directly comparable to the Islamic teachings I study, all I need to do is compare them, and publically declare which I approve and which I reject, et voilà: my faith has shaped my scholarship. But that’s too easy – like saying that one’s scientific inquiry is motivated by wonder at God’s creation, or that one’s medical choices are guided by Christian ethics. Surely the Gospel that so transforms my perspective on daily life has much more to say about the study of Islam, or particles, or diseases. Besides, how many of our colleagues and students really care to hear what we believe, or what sentiments and values motivate our work? Undoubtedly the Gospel shapes our beliefs and motives and values, but if it really transforms the way I view the world, shouldn’t it enable me to know the world better, in ways that even my non-Christian colleagues will be able to appreciate?
It was teaching, more than scholarship, that first compelled me to rethink in explicitly Christian terms what knowledge in my field of study should consist of. Some of my colleagues – even in a state university – unabashedly seek to inculcate in students their own conviction that there must be some deep spirituality or morality that unites all religions. Others seek to socialize students into a critical discourse of suspicion that unmasks the drive for power that must lie behind all religions. Others are content to present supposedly objective textbook summaries of disembodied abstractions called Islam or Hinduism. I have never been able to bring myself to do any of these things in the classroom, but it has taken me some time to figure out why.
The reason, it turns out, is my view of knowledge, which I hope is shaped by the Gospel. I believe the purpose of knowledge in religious studies (and perhaps in the humanities generally) should be the development of human relationships characterized by integrity and sacrificial love. This requires a practice of sacrificial listening, in which the knower’s categories are deconstructed and renegotiated to enable communication with the other, through an ongoing process of identifying and overcoming misunderstandings.
I have yet to encounter a colleague who shares this view of religious studies. For some of my colleagues, to know about a religion is to isolate its essence – the spiritual or moral values that lie hidden beneath the historical and cultural accretions that shape particular manifestations of that religion. For others, to know means to take sides – for the oppressed, and against the hegemonic knowledge-construction of the oppressor. For still others to know means to assimilate generalizations that enable us to classify persons and phenomena as we encounter them. It takes no special discernment (or does it?) to realize that such knowledge is often a self-serving attempt to buttress the knower’s own sense of being right in the world, by reinforcing the belief structure that feeds his or her self-righteousness. Such knowledge is created for the knower’s own ends, and often it is really more about the knower than about the thing known.
Christians are not immune from such self-serving knowledge. Many of us, for example, are perversely comforted by the knowledge that some abstraction called “Islam” is violent or legalistic. Because that knowledge preserves our moral or spiritual self-confidence, we will cling to it, citing chapter and verse from the Qur’an, even when a Muslim tells us to our face that he believes no such thing. Alternatively, we choose to believe that Muslims really share the same values we do so that we can coopt them for our own moral agenda, regardless of what they actually say and do. Such an embrace of the other is not love; it loves only a projection of myself. If I am to love my neighbor as myself, and not merely as a projection of my own hopes and fears, then I will have to be willing to let my self-confidence be shaken by what I learn in conversation with my neighbor. When my self-centered way of knowing others is evaluated against the standard of Christ’s self-sacrificial love, it is subjected to a radical critique. The Gospel demands that I replace my natural mode of knowing human beings with a self-sacrificial epistemology.
In my classes, this idea has led to a pedagogy of sacrificial listening. That means reading primary texts by Muslim authors, regardless of how relevant or comprehensible they are to us, so that students are forced to listen to individual Muslims for themselves, rather than understanding them through the filter of generalizations formulated by myself or other scholars. Generalizations are a necessary tool of understanding, but I want my students to construct them for themselves as they listen to Muslims, and then, just as they are beginning to sense that they have a grasp on an author and can fit him or her comfortably into their worldview, I want them to be compelled to deconstruct their generalizations as they listen with sacrificial attention to yet more Muslim voices. Because this goes against the ways of knowing that are most natural to us, it always involves confusion and frustration. If it is truly self-sacrificial learning, it will be painful for both student and teacher, because our sinful nature resists intellectual as well as material self-sacrifice.
If the Gospel’s demand for a self-sacrificial epistemology implies sacrificial listening in my classes, what does it imply for my scholarly writing? I do not know. At present I only sense that instead of writing “about” Muslims from some higher academic vantage point, and molding their words to my intellectual purposes, I must somehow begin to engage them in conversation, at eye level, so that they can threaten my conclusions and suggest new ones. That would be one step toward writing Christianly, as Miroslav Volf put it at the 2003 Summer Institute.
What about teaching and scholarship in other fields? Does a Christian epistemology require us (and enable us) to listen differently to research data in the social sciences, allowing our cherished theories (and even our Christian policy objectives) to be threatened by the voices of the people we study? Does the whole idea of studying “people in general” need to be re-imagined in terms of the ethics of human relationships? What about the emphasis on self-expression in art: isn’t that challenged by an epistemology of listening to the other? And how should sacrificial love affect the way one knows about “the human body,” or the way one listens to empirical data about the rest of nature, or the way one constructs abstract structures that seem to have nothing to do with human relationships? I do not know. But I want to know. If you can offer even the beginning of an answer, or a comment on the trajectory of my thinking, please email me at vishanoff@ou.edu. Better yet, respond right here on the Harvey Nexus blog. I need your help, and perhaps others do too.
