Unindended dialogues – religious mission and intercultural symmetry

Abstract

The essay describes as a central problem of intercultural dialogue the paradoxical structure of communicating the incommunicable. Religious certainty, taken as a significant example, necessarily is either misrepresented or seriously transformed by discursive dialogues between explicitly articulated religious beliefs, as the core of religious or cultural identity lies on the level of implicit knowledge. The discursive optionalization of religious belief corrupts the constitutive status of implicit religious certainty. In the second part this sceptical account is confronted with the historical factuality of intercultural and religious exchange. Structural conditions are identified which help to overcome the mentioned paradox of communication. Importantly, these conditions are based on the differentiation of forms of religious knowledge andbelief, which again is connected with the difference between membership (in organisations) and participation (in life forms).