We publish the response by Revd Canon Helen Dixon Cameron to the keynote speech by Dr. Dror Bondi at the CCJ Rabbi-Clergy Conference on 23rd November 2023 at Westminster Cathedral Hall.  

Thank you for the invitation to offer an initial response to Dr Dror’s paper. It is a privilege to do so. I may not be the best person to be asked to make this response if you expected a dispute between us, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel has long been an important figure in my understanding of how prayer and justice are deeply connected. I have a picture of Rabbi Heschel and the Revd Martin Luther King pinned above my desk as I write.  The phrase used by Rabbi Heschel in the period of the Civil Rights Marches as he walked and stood alongside MLK , “we pray with our feet”, to describe the interconnectedness of religious practice and prophetic action has been a huge influence on me in my own Christian leadership.

I want to make one broad initial comment about the emphasis in Dror’s paper on the role of experience and revelation in building our understanding of the nature of God and a comment about the consequences for all us of such a perspective for inter-faith dialogue. I will be brief because it is conversation between us which is most important.

I come from a part of the tradition of the Christian tradition, the Methodist Church, which holds that direct religious experience needs to be valued as a theological tool of enquiry alongside scripture, tradition and reason (described by Outler in the 1960s as “the Wesleyan or Methodist  Quadrilateral”). In our theological task, we follow John Wesley’s practice of examining all human experience, both individual and corporate, for confirmations of the realities of God’s grace attested in Scripture.

Our experience interacts with Scripture. We read Scripture in light of the conditions and events that help shape who we are, and we interpret our experience in terms of Scripture. On the personal level, experience is to the individual Christian as tradition is to the church, it is the way we find meaning from our perspective of God’s forgiving and empowering grace. Experience authenticates in our own lives the truths revealed in Scripture and illumined in tradition, enabling us to claim the Christian witness as our own. Experience gives us new eyes to see the living truth in Scripture. It confirms the biblical message for our present situation. Although profoundly personal, Christian experience is also corporate; our theological task is informed by the experience of the church and by the common experiences of all humanity. Many of God’s people live in terror, hunger, loneliness, and degradation. Everyday experiences of birth and death, of growth and life in the created world, and an awareness of wider social relations also belong to serious theological reflection. A new awareness of such experiences can inform our appropriation of scriptural truths and sharpen our appreciation of the good news of the kingdom of God.

This means that as a Christian leader I find profound resonances in Dr Dror’s paper and his emphasis on the importance of experience in relation to text. But I must engage, as he did, with what the implications of these resonances have for inter-faith dialogue, understanding and trust. Heschel’s first lecture was entitled, in a nod to John Donne, “No religion is an island”.  His clear call for us to meet one another,

“as human beings who have so much in common: a heart, a face, a voice the presence of a soul, fears, hope, the ability to trust, a capacity for compassion and understanding”,

must encourage us to approach one another with open hearts and minds.

Yet Heschel, as interpreted by Dror, is also clear that to truly meet one another is to be profoundly challenged because each human person is a disclosure of the divine and an opening to the perspective of God. Heschel asks himself does the difference in commitment between peoples of faith to our sources of authority cancel out what we have in common as those made in the image of God. He takes the question a step further in an assertion – if when we stand before one another, we forget God that is when we make substitutes for God and embrace a fundamentalist perspective. Only standing before God can lead us to peace because in the presence of God we are invited to share God’s perspective.

This paper from Dror has been important to engage with at a time of war and atrocity.

I am left asking what substitutes for God’s perspective on our world do we embrace and are reluctant to let go of? I am moved and challenged by Heschel’s answer – “any God who is mine but not yours, concerned for me, not you is not God”

I am also left wondering about the depth of involvement, of engagement, of spiritual maturity in our respective faith traditions that is required of us as people of faith to make a difference in our engagement with others.  Superficiality, triviality and courtesy just isn’t enough. We need to know the depth of our tradition, be mature in it, show deep conviction and even confidence in our tradition – all accompanied by an awareness of the need of the other.  

Thank you, Dror for your presence among us, the challenge you bring and the hope your contribution brings us today. We are enriched by it, and by you.