Thread by @Delafina777

Okay, since Twitter makes it very easy to ask questions and get answers about different traditions and cultures, let's talk about Krister Stendahl's 3 rules for approaching another spiritual tradition (or, honestly, another culture at all) and its adherents to learn.

Krister Stendahl was a Swedish theologian and scholar who served as dean of Harvard Divinity School before going on to be the bishop of Stockholm. He was also a director at the Shalom Hartman Center for Religious Pluralism.

I first encountered him while studying the New Testament in college. He wrote some very compelling stuff about how Paul's whole deal was trying to figure out how to reconcile a universal deity with the specifically Jewish covenant (which makes sense of a lot of weirdness).

As he studied Jesus's Jewish context to attempt to better understand the NT, he got a lot more interested in Judaism and in interfaith dialogue in general. In 1985, at a press conference, he came up with his rules for approaching and understanding other traditions:

Stendahl's 3 rules for approaching/understanding other spiritual traditions:

1) when you try to understand another religion, you should ask its adherents and not its enemies
2) don't compare your best to their worst
3) leave room for holy envy

#1 means, for example, that if you want to understand Sharia Law, you don't get your information from American non-Muslim reporters or talking heads. You don't even let them dictate where you look for information.

You ask Muslims to explain their own tradition to you. Even, or actually ESPECIALLY, if you're afraid of it. You go to the people who practice the tradition, and you learn from them. And you do so with an open mind.

It doesn't mean you can't fact-check, and it doesn't mean you can't learn from people who are critical of the tradition. But that's not where you start your inquiry. You start by learning from the source, and you do it in good faith.

#2 comes up a LOT in Jewish-Christian dialogue, in pieces. Christians eager to credit Jesus as freeing women like to compare his attitude toward women to statements by rabbis from centuries later (and sometimes voicing minority views not put into practice).

But when you're comparing religions' attitudes toward a subject, and you're comparing the best of one religion to the worst of another, you're acting in bad faith. You compare the best to the best, and the worst to the worst.

You pay attention to time period. You pay attention to normative versus fringe practices. You compare like to like.

And #3 is the most ambiguous, but also the most compelling. You leave room for "holy envy." You remain open to admiring things within the tradition, to wishing that there was something similar in your tradition/beliefs/practice, to learning.

And while most people in the 1980s weren't necessarily worried about appropriation in the same way we are today, I don't think he was encouraging appropriation. I don't think he was saying that your admiration should involve wholesale incorporation.

But if it encourages you to evaluate and evolve your values, if it encourages you to seek or develop something within your own practice that is inspired by another, that attempts to achieve similar goals, I think that's very different, and very healthy.

Heck, I think if it encourages you to find something similar that's been languishing or forgotten within your own tradition and help it flourish and grow again, I think that's sacred work.

And I think these rules are SO IMPORTANT for journalists, authors, etc. Even if what you're writing is an expose. If you're going to write a piece or a book on another tradition, and are trying to understand it, you start with its actual texts, people writing from within.

It's the difference between genuinely wanting to understand a spiritual practice, and why its adherents do as they do, and just wanting to be angry at it.

And this doesn't mean you have to do this with everything. It's guidelines for what approaching and attempting to understand in good faith means. It's intended for outsiders, not people who've been abused within a community.