The Influence of the Nature of Inter-religious Dialogue on the Interpretation of the Scriptures

There are different views and paradigms with regard to the interaction between religions. Buy a quick review of the news of the interactions between leaders and followers of religions and international conferences in this regards shows us that the advocates of “inter-religious dialogue” have become the flagship in the field of interfaith interactions. Today, the prevalent and dominant paradigm in interreligious interactions is dialogue and coexistence. Due to the great role of sacred texts in the Abrahamic religions, one of the most important sources that the advocates of inter-religious dialogue use to support their goals is to provide proof and evidence from the sacred texts. But a look at the writings of the advocates of the inter-religious dialogue shows that the way they deploy and interpret the scripture has significant differences with the interpretation of the advocates of other views. The question that this treatise seeks to examine is the extent to which the interpretations of the advocates of the inter-religious dialogue is influenced by the values of inter-religious dialogue. To reach this goal, it was necessary to analyze and identify the dominant mentality of the religious dialogue paradigm. For this purpose, five Christian, Islamic and Jewish documents were selected, which can be considered as the most important documents related to religious dialogue in recent decades. Then, using the grounded theory, these documents were scrutinized, and their main components were extracted. Analyzing these components, it has been shown that modern values such as the intrinsic desirability of the peace, the dignity of humans regardless of their religion and race, and the attempt to build the world, are the values and criteria that lead the dialogue of religions. In the next step, and to examine the effects of the dialogue on the interpretation of sacred texts, examples of how the sacred texts are interpreted in the works of the advocates of the inter-religious dialogue are provided. These examples show that the advocates of dialogue in the two major domains have presented new interpretations, first to justify the foundations of interfaith dialogue and the second to provide theological foundations for the dialogue. In the end, this analysis has been provided that all these interpretative developments can be attributed to the domination of modern values over the mentality of inter-religious dialogue, which, in turn, is the product of the changes in  theology in modern times; that is, the modern theology is more concerned about human that the traditional theology was.