Jews, Muslims and Christians gathered to share intellect and opinion within an interfaith “Trialogue” at this year’s Laurence J. McGinley Lecture. The Annual McGinley lecture focused on the connection between the faiths through the word “Amen.” The three religions each share a variant of the term Amen, used to solidify prayer and reconfirm a faith community’s relationship with their God.
Father Patrick Ryan, S.J., an author and professor who spent 26 years in West Africa, gave the lecture as part of his installation in the McGinley Chair. Ryan began by recognizing the predecessor of his position, the late Avery Cardinal Dulles.
“Dulles called the faith a constant feature of human cognition and existence. Faith, he wrote, is the self surrender to God as God reveals himself,” Ryan said. “Dulles insisted on this context on the absolute priority of God as the one who invites human persons to faith.”
The three faith focus of the trialogue illustrated the similarities between sacred texts of Jews, Christians and Muslims and the term for God’s relationship with humans.
“The ultimate context of faith as a concept can be found in the divine human bonding that the Hebrew Bible calls covenant, the New Testament develops as a new covenant and the Qu’ran calls mithaq,” Ryan said.
The word Amen varies between each of the sacred texts, the Torah, the Bible and the Qu’ran, but each religion recognizes the word as an affirmation of prayer. Reverend Patrick Ryan says the word Amen holds power in each religion; when people say “Amen,” they are testifying “I put my faith in this, or rather, I pledge my fidelity to you.” Ryan said Christians can use this trialogue to study scripture and learn from Jews and Muslims.
“Jews, Christians and Muslims should understand each other and understand the cousinship we have,” he said. “We use many of the same religious categories.”
Rabbi Daniel Polish, giving the Jewish response to the lecture said the meaning of faith is essentially the same between all three religions. He said Jewish people also have a covenant with God that may not be written in a creed but one that is reflected in prayer.
“A vast majority of Jewish prayers are written in the plural,” Polish said. “The highest qualities of God are to be reciprocated in human behavior with the oneness of God. By their very faithfulness to God, Jews make God one.”
Each faith needs to work to understand the structure of the religious lives of the others.
“The faith of Jews and Muslims has most commonly been expressed by living life according to religious law,” Ryan said. “Christians often misunderstand the lives of Jews and Muslims for this reason.”
Ryan looked to examples from theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith who said “the fundamental of faith is to be something more personal. God calls men and women to participate in His life as a self-surrender to God as he reveals himself.”
“Faith is not a set of beliefs but rather a bilateral reciprocated relationship between God and individual people,” Ryan said. “There’s a demand from individuals and God as well as a response of human fidelity to God.”
The covenant of faith is also apparent in the New Testament Ryan said. Amen is a central term in the Gospels which reflects the teaching element of Jesus’ sermons.
“We see a shift in the use of Amen in prayers in the New Testament,” he said. “Amen shifts to the beginning and is used to start the prayer. Jesus often said ‘Amen I say to you.’ Amen at the beginning of prayer lays a great emphasis on teaching. Jesus is saying, ‘put your faith in this.’”
Ryan says Jesus is the one who inaugurates the new covenant.
In the Qu’ran, the mithaq represents the covenant between God and His people.
“The word Amin, in Arabic never occurs in the Qu’ran, but Sunni Muslims start their prayer with Amin,” Ryan said. “Amin is the response to the recitation of the first Surah of the Qu’ran.”
Professor Amir Hussain, Ph.D, a theologian from Loyola Marymount University, providing the Islamic response to the lecture said interfaith discussion calls Christians, Jews and Muslims into an understanding of faith.
“In the Qu’ran God’s challenge and mercy are presented to humans,” Hussain said. “A person of faith is he who says yes, it is a self commitment to God. Believers are called Amen-sayers meaning he who volunteers.”
Emily Mercer, FCLC ’10, a theology major who attended the lecture said she was not surprised by the interconnectedness between the religions.
“The discussion between the speakers of the different religions really portrayed that they all came from the same fundamentals, so it makes sense that they would have similar aspects,” Mercer said.
Although prayers may differ between people of differing faiths but Ryan said they all share a special bond.
“What unites all humanity is that all of us have entered into existence responding to the existence of God,” he said.
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