"Covenant: A Basis for Listening and Witnessing in Inter-Faith Dialogue"

Paul Fiddes, British Baptist theologian and Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Oxford, has been described as ‘one of the leading scholars of theology and literature writing today’. He is the author of The Creative Suffering of God, Participating in God and Seeing the World and Knowing God.

In this, the third St Hild Lecture, Professor Fiddes addresses the question of ‘common ground’ between different faiths, a common space in which different partners talk together and live together. He proposes that the double command of Christ to love God and our neighbour can be just such a common ground. The scriptural idea of coming together has been central to the life and thought of such dissenting churches as Baptists, namely a coming of members and churches into ‘covenant’. This provides a basis both for a Christian witness to Christ which is truly open to listening to, and learning from, the other, and for the advocacy of religious freedom for all.