In my previous post, Tom recommended a book by Krister Stendahl. I looked on the Wikipedia entry on Stendahl and found his wonderful “Three Rules for Religious Understanding.”

1. When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
2. Don’t compare your best to their worst.
3. Leave room for “holy envy.” (By this Stendahl meant that you should be willing to find elements in the other religious tradition and faith that you admire and wish could, in some way, be reflected in your own religious tradition or faith.)

The first rule hits home. I remember when I was younger and I would seek to learn about other faiths, I would read what Christians had to say about those religions rather than what the adherents of those religions would say about their beliefs. I wish we all would offer more charitable reads of ideologies different than our own by listening to those ideologies directly. I’m not saying those Christian voices were wrong in their critiques, but there is a difference of learning a position from someone trying to edify it from within and from someone trying to debunk it from without. It happened in seminary as well. I read enough works criticizing Martin Luther that by the time I picked up his writings, I was ready to disagree with him. By reading his own words, I can say both that I actually like Luther quite a bit and I agree with many of those criticisms of him, but not all of them. Stendahl’s rules offer a good analytical matrix for nearly any area of life, be it religious, political, economic, scientific, etc.