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November 10, 2009 | The Rev. David Marshall was chaplain at Lambeth Palace from 2000 to 2005, serving both the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and his predecessor, George Carey. As chaplain, Marshall brought to the post an expertise in Christian-Muslim dialogue and helped organize and launch the Archbishop’s Building Bridges Seminar, an annual gathering of Christian and Muslim religious scholars. He continues to serve as the seminar’s academic director, is a research fellow at the Berkley Center at Georgetown University and lives in the Lake District in Northern England.

He visited Duke Divinity School in October 2009 to deliver a lecture for the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies and was a guest speaker in a class taught by Imam Abdullah Antepli, Duke’s Muslim chaplain. He spoke with Faith & Leadership about Islam, Christian-Muslim relations and the value of interfaith dialogue.

Q: How did you become interested in Islam and Christian/Muslim relations?

When I was an undergraduate in theology at Oxford University in the early ’80s, the curriculum was focused on traditional Christian theology. But during a vacation, I watched a television program about the Muslim community in Britain and realized that I knew nothing about it and that if I was going to be an ordained minister then I needed to. So I arranged to do a course on Islam, and it was fascinating. It opened up a whole world that I didn’t know about. It was interesting as an academic subject but it was also challenging and fruitful for me as a Christian, perhaps more than any other course because it prompted me to think harder about my own faith.

Q: What are the three virtues you’ve articulated for Christians engaged in Christian/Muslim dialogue?

The first is intelligence -- an intelligent, sympathetic openness to who Muslims actually are rather than living off the stereotypes. Don’t just hear about Islam from a Christian. Learn about Islam from Muslims. Read Muslim books, magazines and websites but also speak to Muslims, make Muslim friends. Most Muslims will be very willing to tell you about their beliefs.

Having a sympathetic intelligence involves a willingness to be confused. If you open yourself up to a sympathetic, intelligent understanding of Islam, you will be exposed to its complexity -- this Muslim believes this, and this Muslim believes that, and they don’t believe the same thing as the textbooks say they should. You're not in for an easy ride. An intelligent understanding may be a more troubled understanding, a more complex understanding, but one of the things church leaders owe to their people is a willingness to challenge simple stereotypical views.

The second virtue is humility. If we are perceptive, we can notice a theme throughout Scripture calling us to be open to what God might have to teach us through those beyond our faith community. Stories of Jesus and the Samaritan, stories like Jonah, there are these and other accounts in which it's the outsider, the apparent unbeliever beyond the covenant community, who is more attuned to God than the person within the faith community. This strand warns us against thinking that because we’re in the faith community we've got it all sorted out and they have nothing to teach us.

God is free to act through others. God wants to teach us through others. If we have a basic openness and humility in our engagement with the other, then God will teach us. And one of the things God will teach us through the encounter with Muslims is how to be better Christians. For me, it's not about wanting to become a quasi-Muslim Christian. I'm not drawn to become a Muslim, but an encounter with Muslims draws my attention to virtues and practices that may be underemphasized in contemporary Christianity, which Muslims take seriously and which we don’t, and it prompts me to think harder. It's unsettling. It challenges my complacency.

And then thirdly, confidence -- confidence that as we learn about Islam, we can remain convinced of the truth of the Christian faith and indeed be led deeper into it. We need to be ready to give an account of our faith, and the encounter with Islam challenges us to do that. It challenges us to think harder about our faith. For example, it challenges us to think why we believe in the Trinity, which many Christians struggle to give an account of. Or again, Muslims believe that in order to forgive us, God can just forgive us. Muslims can't understand the need for a cross, the need for atonement. To the Muslim mind it's a bizarre, frankly unacceptable idea. The cross is clearly a key part of the Christian faith, but if you’ve only operated within a Christian context, you perhaps take it for granted.

Can you imagine you’ve never heard this message? It is not at all self-evident that a man dying on a cross is the place you go to find the love of God. St. Paul said people regarded it as foolishness, weakness, stupidity. Why should we go there to find the love of God? It's a very unsettling question. Engagement with Islam shakes me back into a fresh appreciation of the core Christian convictions. It blows the dust off and helps me see them afresh, hopefully with a humble confidence that allows me to speak about them with my fellow Christians and also with Muslims.

Q: You have said that Christian/Muslim dialogue is about much more than theological differences. Could you elaborate on that?