Asking Better Questions: Rev. Paul Baxley and Rabbi Eric Linder

October 17, 2018

Rev. Paul Baxley, a Baptist pastor, and Rabbi Eric Linder were brought together by a shared commitment to interfaith work in Athens, Georgia, where they started an interreligious partnership in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. In this conversation, the friends and colleagues reflect on the challenges and possibilities of interfaith dialogue in a polarized society.

This story was produced by David Dault at Sandburg Media, LLC.

This story is a part of the American Pilgrimage Project, a conversation series that invites Americans of diverse backgrounds to sit together and talk to each other one-to-one about the role their religious beliefs play at crucial moments in their lives. The interview was recorded by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.

Rabbi Eric Linder: For me, religion is not about ultimate answers, it's about asking better questions. And I think I see some of the conflict in that people use religion as a way to have pat answers to things, and there's a comfort to that. I mean, I totally understand that. But I think theology is so much more complex. I mean, just look at the world we live in. There's nothing simple about it, the way our bodies work. So, to boil things down to the simple things in some ways I think is an insult to God.

Rev. Paul Baxley: I think some of the most beautiful texts in scriptures do provide comfort, but there, I think, is a difference between that kind of deep abiding comfort and just conforming convenience, that, well, the scriptures already confirmed what I already think.

Rabbi Eric Linder: Exactly.

Rev. Paul Baxley: They confirm that I'm right. And because they confirm that I'm right, I can rest at ease. When you look at the stories on the pages of the Torah or the New Testament, and there's plenty of evidence that God's quite willing to unsettle us.

Rabbi Eric Linder: Oh yeah.

Rev. Paul Baxley: And for me, the humility recognizes God has more going on than God has yet disclosed to me or that yet I'm ready to experience.

Rabbi Eric Linder: And I think you and I share this perspective that interfaith work, which is what brought us together, isn't about the idea of we're all the same and we all believe the same God, which we may. I happen to not believe that. We can talk about that if you want to. But really that it's our differences that make us interesting and special, and we should in some ways focus on those differences and learn from them and appreciate them.

Rev. Paul Baxley: Yeah, it's interesting. When we first started organizing this interfaith partnership, we were also having our first interfaith service. I remember we started planning for that first interfaith Thanksgiving service in the late spring, early summer of 2016, and we were going to do it at Thanksgiving. And I don't think any of us imagined what was going to happen in the political arena between May, June of 2016 and November of 2016.

Rabbi Eric Linder: Yeah.

Rev. Paul Baxley: Somewhere around early November of 2016, I think it became clear to all of us that we had a bigger mission, because we were living in a world that was more and more being trained to fear difference and push difference away. And I think that's one of the reasons when we had that first service, even though it wasn't all that diverse by interfaith standards, we had a capacity crowd.

Rabbi Eric Linder: Oh, yeah. And your church-

Rev. Paul Baxley: People were coming from Atlanta. Our sanctuary was full, more than 600 people, because people were hungry for a different way of responding to difference.

Rabbi Eric Linder: Right.

Rev. Paul Baxley: And so, I think part of our mission, part of our opportunity is to first discover for ourselves a different way of relating in the presence of difference, and then to invite our congregations into that, and then hopefully let congregations model that for larger communities, because I think it's desperately needed.

Rabbi Eric Linder: And what's interesting to me about that is precisely because of that, we sometimes step on each other's feet, which in some ways is the goal. We have some members of our steering committee who say by doing this work, we are necessarily going to sometimes offend each other and sometimes upset each other. And I like that I think we, as a group, recognize that the goal isn't never to do that. The goal is to do that and then move from that. And God tells Abraham, "Go forth," and in the Hebrew, it means both physically go on a journey, but it also means find. It's an idea of finding yourself. Go into yourself. And so, by going out, we discover who we really are at our core. And I think that's certainly why I do this work.

Rev. Paul Baxley: Yes. And I look forward to continuing to learn.

Rabbi Eric Linder: Always.