We must follow Jesus and be willing to give our lives for the sake of reconciliation, Archbishop Justin Welby told an audience at Queen's University Belfast yesterday.
Delivering the annual Church of Ireland Theological Lecture, Welby reflected on the nature of religiously-justified violence, in the context of the rise of Islamic State.
"We are in a struggle with a terrorist force of extreme evil," he said.
A member of the audience asked how this idea of reconciliation could be carried out given "that as Christians we believe that Jesus Christ is the only means of salvation and – one of our tasks – we are called to evangelise? So how far can we go with people we believe are wrong?"
Welby responded: "Well Jesus went to the cross, there's no need to go any further than that.
"And I would say that is where we go. We give everything. We give our lives."
There is no choice between Jesus and reconciliation, he added. In sharing Christ we offer reconciliation, and inevitably, in offering reconciliation we end up sharing Christ: "The two go together".
In the face of evil, "our political vision of what reconciliation in this struggle would look like must include the idea of a world in which religiously justified violence is eliminated... It must be a hope and an expectation," he said.
"Our starting point, in building this narrative should be giving voice to the people who experience humiliation: asking what we can do for them and how can we give them hope?" he said. "We must start relationships of love, which aims for human dignity and flourishing. And in practice this brings us to identity, to hospitality and generosity."
He called for a growing of wisdom when looking at the situation, for "wisdom tackles the lost nuances of theology, a curse of our age in many faith traditions, and enables us to engage theologically with the other across faiths, without hatred and without cyncism."
We must follow Jesus and be willing to give our lives for the sake of reconciliation, Archbishop Justin Welby told an audience at Queen's University Belfast yesterday.
