I’m not sure if people saw “Loving God and Neighbor Together,” but I just came across it. It is an open letter from many Christian theologians to Muslims, published in the New York Times in response to the Muslim letter to Christians, “A Common Word Between You and Us.” The Muslim clerics, scholars, and intellectuals from every branch of the faith write:

Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.

The basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbour. These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity. The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.

The Christians write back:

We find deep affinities with our own Christian faith when A Common Word Between Us and You insists that love is the pinnacle of our duties toward our neighbors. “None of you has faith until you love for your neighbor what you love for yourself,” the Prophet Muhammad said. In the New Testament we similarly read, “whoever does not love [the neighbor] does not know God” (1 John 4:8) and “whoever does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). God is love, and our highest calling as human beings is to imitate the One whom we worship.

I find this dialogue extremely hopeful. I pray deeply that Christians and Muslims would be able to find common ground to live with one another. I am reminded of Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, an organization that seeks to engender deep religious convictions and cooperation across faiths. His vision isn’t that we all believe the same things, but that in embracing our traditions strongly and in learning from others’ traditions, we can find common ground. He wants the students who participate in his program to see that among many religions, and especially among the three Abrahamic faiths, that service of others is a core value. In a wonderful interview with the radio show Speaking of Faith, Patel says:

You have a gut-level respect for people’s identity when it comes to ethnicity, gender, class, race. Why not religion? And the second thing is religious people are changing our world. You can sit in a corner and whine about it, or you can be on the bus and figure out how we can all work together to build a world where people cooperate and live together in some sort of mutual loyalty. I’ll tell you something: Muslims are not going to stop being Muslim….

Christians are not going to stop being Christian. The question is, the challenge is, how do we promote a way of being Christian and Muslim and Jewish and Buddhist and Hindu that lives in cooperation with other people?