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During my recent trip to New York City I visited the World Trade Center site. This gaping hole, where the two largest buildings in the world had once stood, is the most powerful symbol imaginable of the consequences of holocaustic faith, a faith so convinced of its own truth that it concludes that those who do not accept that faith have no right to live.

In the case of the World Trade Center the faith in question is Islam, but the other two monotheistic faiths, Judaism and Christianity, have also operated in the same way. The murder of the prophets of Baal, which has been omitted from the Prayer Book lectionary, illustrates a time when Judaism was a holocaustic faith. In the Biblical accounts of the conquest of the Land, the vanquished peoples are put to the sword--men, women, and children, or else subjected to a condition of slavery in the service of their masters, as "hewers of wood and drawers of water" (Deuteronomy 29:11).

Christianity too once practiced jihad, calling it a "crusade" against the infidel, and, in the Wars of Religion, inner-Christian rivalry showed the same ferocity as the crusades against the Muslim world.

The day after I visited the World Trade Center site, I heard an interview on TV with a leading authority on Islam, in which he pleaded with moderate Muslim leaders to speak out against an interpretation of Islam which will inevitably bring destruction not just upon the victims of jihad but upon its perpetrators as well.

Obviously, we all hope that moderation will prevail and that religious faith will not be deaf to the voice of reason, represented by the town clerk in Ephesus:

If the silversmiths have a complaint against any one,
the courts are open, and there are proconsuls; let them bring charges.
For we are in danger of being charged with rioting today,
there being no cause that we can give to justify this commotion.
Acts 19:38

Reason and moderation are the foundations of civilized society, but, in my opinion, they do not fully resolve the problem of holocaustic faith. The most they can do is to persuade the believer that, although the infidel deserves to die, reason and moderation argue against carrying out the execution, and suggest instead consigning the infidel to punishment in the world to come.

The root problem lies in monotheism itself and in the move made by all three monotheistic faiths from "one Lord" to "one faith" (Ephesians 4:5). In each case the symbol system which leads the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim believer to the one in whom "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28) is literalized and taken to be reality, pure and simple. And when my reality comes into conflict with your reality, the results can be deadly, whether or not they taken to the limit.

The Jesuit theologian Roger Haight has written a book entitled Jesus, Symbol of God. This book has come into the sights of the defenders of orthodoxy in Rome, who have been quick to respond: Jesus is no symbol of God; Jesus is God, pure and simple. Anything short of this is heresy. I do not expect that Professor Haight will be burned at the stake, which might have happened in a less enlightened age, but he has already been forbidden to teach and is subjected to pressure and intimidation which are sure to have serious negative effects.

For all the problems that we face in the Anglican Church, I thank God that we have never claimed to be the one true Church. This had not prevented the Church of England from persecuting recusants and non-conformists, but it removed any justification for passing judgment on the belief, or unbelief, of another. For me this is not simply restraint, based on considerations of reason and moderation. It is an expression of my faith as an Anglican Christian.

June 30, 2002

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